290 summarised stories about Developer Tools, each linking back to the original source. Browse all topics →
Simon Willison 2 days ago
Simon Willison examined his Datasette open source project's GitHub code-frequency chart to measure the impact of AI coding assistants on his productivity. A notable spike in commit frequency appeared in the most recent period, coinciding with the release of models including Opus 4.8, GPT-5.5, Fable 5, and GPT-5.6 Sol. The increased activity suggests AI coding tools have accelerated his development pace on the project.
The Neuron 3 days ago
PlugThis is an AI tool that generates functional Chrome extensions from plain-English descriptions without requiring coding knowledge. Users can build working extensions in 2–3 prompts, with examples including one completed in under a day and another deployed in approximately ten minutes. The tool generates complete Manifest v3-compliant code with optional backend integration via Supabase and AI model connectivity, which users can then publish to the Chrome Web Store or modify as needed.
The Neuron 3 days ago
Microsoft Research released Flint, an open-source visualization language that lets AI agents generate polished charts from simple, human-editable specifications. In evaluation across three AI models on Tidy Tuesdays test data, Flint achieved judge scores of 16.27 with GPT-5.1 compared to 15.91 for a baseline direct Vega-Lite approach. The same Flint specification can compile to multiple visualization backends including Vega-Lite, Apache ECharts, and Chart.js, with an accompanying MCP server enabling agents to create and render charts directly in chat environments.
The Neuron 3 days ago
GitHub released Spec Kit, an open-source toolkit that enables developers to write executable specifications that directly generate working code implementations through AI coding agents. The toolkit installs via `uv tool install specify-cli` and works with over 30 AI coding agents including GitHub Copilot and Claude. Users define project principles, create specifications describing what to build, establish technical plans and task lists, then execute implementation—shifting development from code-first to specification-first workflows.
