devtools.fm: Developer Tools, Open Source, Software Development

This week we're joined by Tarun Sachdeva, founder of Traces and previously head of product at Wattpad. Traces gives coding agent sessions a home: a CLI that collects sessions from Claude Code, Codex and other harnesses, and traces.com, where you can share them like pushing code to GitHub and link them to the commits and pull requests they produced. We talk about why agent sessions are decision data worth keeping, privacy and sharing defaults, rethinking code review as its own agent session, Surfaces for visualizing tokens, skills and security risks, and how teams can use trace data to learn without it feeling like surveillance. https://traces.com https://traces.com/blog https://traces.com/blog/surfaces https://traces.com/blog/agent-sessions-are-a-dataset https://x.com/tarunsachdeva https://github.com/tarunsachdeva https://market.dev 00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:14 Tarun's Background and Career 00:05:48 Why Traces Was Built 00:09:53 How Traces Works 00:13:57 Privacy and Sharing Defaults 00:17:20 Git Commits and Code Review 00:18:57 Ad 00:20:01 Reviewing PRs with Traces 00:23:57 What Surfaces Are 00:28:09 PR Storytelling and Session Effort 00:37:25 Cost of Agent Sessions 00:40:42 Traces Beyond Coding 00:43:31 Data Culture and Surveillance Concerns 00:52:04 Closing Thoughts and Thanks Full show notes and transcript: https://devtools.fm/episode/180

This week we're joined by Boris Tane, founder of Polylane and previously founder of Baselime, the observability startup Cloudflare acquired in 2024, where he went on to lead Workers observability. Polylane builds a live topology map across your cloud, observability tools, and repos so an agent can detect, investigate, and fix production issues before anyone gets paged. We talk about why bolted-on AI tools fail for on-call, how Polylane's memory systems work, using trajectory analysis to vet pull requests before they merge, and what happens to the on-call rotation as agents write more of our code. https://polylane.com https://boristane.com https://x.com/boristane https://boristane.com/blog/on-call-is-now-theatre/ https://www.cloudflare.com/press/press-releases/2024/cloudflare-enters-observability-market-with-acquisition-baselime/ https://www.openstatus.dev 00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:07 Boris's Path from Aerospace 00:06:44 Scale and Agents at Cloudflare 00:13:09 Why Bolt-On Tools Fail 00:17:15 Ad 00:18:19 Onboarding and Topology Discovery 00:21:20 Memory Systems for Agents 00:27:19 Trajectory Analysis for Pull Requests 00:33:06 Auto-Merging and Review Trust 00:38:51 Preview Environments and Feature Flags 00:44:58 Status Pages and External Outages 00:47:35 The Future of On-Call Work 00:51:13 Uneven Future and Wrap-Up Full show notes and transcript: https://devtools.fm/episode/179

This week we're joined by Bobby Grayson, a longtime Elixir developer and the creator of Deciduous, a decision graph that gives LLMs a living memory.Deciduous stores goals, options, and outcomes in a SQLite-backed graph that agents like Claude Code can query as they work, so they remember why decisions were made instead of repeating past mistakes.We talk about how it slots invisibly into an agent workflow, how teams share decision graphs, the surprising authors using it to organize their books, and where coding is headed in the next five years. https://deciduous.dev https://github.com/notactuallytreyanastasio/deciduous https://github.com/notactuallytreyanastasio/shoehorn https://cure-lang.org https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript

This week we're joined by Scott Lanoue, the creator of CoMail, a cooperative email service built on the AT Protocol.Getting a self-hosted mail server to actually land in the inbox is a months-long slog of warming IPs and building domain reputation, so CoMail pools that reputation across everyone sending through a shared relay. We talk about how atproto identity lets CoMail vend out trust instead of spam scores, what it means to store your mail in your own PDS with spaces, and why a co-op might be a better shape than a startup for a protocol with no moats. https://comail.at/ https://scottlanoue.com/ https://bsky.app/profile/scottlanoue.com https://tangled.org/scottlanoue.com/atmosphere-mail

This week we're joined by Jacob Miller, founder of DiffUI, an AI-driven UI design tool. DiffUi uses diffusion models to generate UI designs, and then uses a large language model to convert the designs to code. Jacob is a design systems expert and has a lot of experience with design systems, and that's baked right into the product. https://x.com/pwnies https://diffui.ai

This week we're joined by Jacob Beckerman, the founder and CEO of Macro. Macro is a tool to cut through the noise. It's a workspace built for engineers. And it's one place for all your emails, your tasks, your chat, and your documents. We talk about the creation of Macro, and the future of the company. Macro: https://macro.com Docs: https://docs.macro.com GitHub: https://github.com/jbecke X: https://x.com/j_becke LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/jbecke

This week we're joined by Rita Kozlov and Steve Faulkner, the co-founders of Cloudflare. The big news of the day is that Cloudflare has acquired Vite. This is a big deal for the JavaScript ecosystem and for the future of developer tools. We talk about the acquisition and what it means for Cloudflare and project. https://www.cloudflare.com/ https://workers.cloudflare.com/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/ https://x.com/rita3ko

This week we're joined by Jeff Dickey, the creator of HK, Fnox, Aube, and Mise.We talk about the creation of these tools and what led him to work on them full time with his new company, en.dev.After that we dive into the future of these tools and what's next for Jeff. Previous episode: https://www.devtools.fm/episode/129 https://jdx.dev/ https://en.dev/ https://github.com/jdx https://jdx.dev/posts/2026-04-17-going-full-time-on-open-source/ https://github.com/endevco/aube https://github.com/jdx/hk https://github.com/jdx/fnox

This week we're joined by Sam Goodwin, the creator of Alchemy. Alchemy is a tool that allows you to create and manage your infrastructure as code. The current state of the art is built on all the tech debt of the past 10 years, Alchemy is a new approach to infrastructure as code that is more aligned with the modern web. https://v2.alchemy.run/ https://github.com/alchemy-run/alchemy-effect https://github.com/alchemy-run/distilled https://alchemy.run (v1)

This week we're joined by Elio Struyf, the creator of Front Matter CMS and Demo Time.We talk about the origins of Front Matter CMS, the challenges of building a CMS, and the future of CMSs.We also dive into Demo Time, and how it can be used to create perfect demos for talks and presentations. GitHub: github.com/estruyf Website: eliostruyf.com Bluesky: @eliostruyf.com

This week we're joined by Alem Tuzlak, the creator of Tanstack Dev Tools and maintainer of Tanstack AI. We talk about the creation of Tanstack Dev Tools and what led him to work on it. After that we dive into Tanstack AI and how it differs from other AI libraries. GitHub https://github.com/AlemTuzlak Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/alem.forge42.dev LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/alem-tuzlak/ YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@alemtuzlak TanStack AI https://tanstack.com/ai/latest TanStack Devtools https://tanstack.com/devtools/latest

This week we're joined by Paolo Ricciuti, a Svelte maintainer and the creator of TMCP.We talk about his journey into the world of software development, his work on Svelte, and his new project TMCP.There has been a lot of changes in the Svelte ecosystem since we last talked to Rich, so we're excited to hear about the new features and improvements in Svelte 5! Website: https://ricciuti.me GitHub: https://github.com/paoloricciuti Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/paolo.ricciuti.me SvelteLab: https://sveltelab.dev TMCP: https://github.com/paoloricciuti/tmcp sveltekit-search-params: https://github.com/paoloricciuti/sveltekit-search-params Speaking: https://ricciuti.me/speaking Mainmatter: https://mainmatter.com

This week we're joined by Mark Erikson, the lead maintainer of Redux and the founder of Replay.io. We talk about his journey into the world of software development, his work on Redux, and all the cool stuff he's been doing at Replay.io. https://www.linkedin.com/in/markerikson/ https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/hire-me/ https://bsky.app/profile/acemarke.dev https://github.com/markerikson

This week we're joined by Ben Curtis, the founder and CEO of Honeybadger and creator of Breakwater. Ben has been a pillar of the Ruby community for over 20 years, and has been a driving force behind many of the tools and frameworks that we use today. We talk about his journey into the world of software development, his work on Honeybadger, and his new project Breakwater. https://www.honeybadger.io https://www.bencurtis.com https://www.breakwaterapp.com https://bsky.app/profile/bencurtis.com https://github.com/stympy https://www.linkedin.com/in/bencurtis https://hachyderm.io/@bencurtis

This week we're joined by Jamon Holmgren, the founder and CEO of Infinite Red. Infinite Red is a software consultancy that specializes in building React Native apps. We talk about his early days of coding, starting a consultancy, remote culture at Infinite Red, React Native, community and Chain React, and building his new game Into the Dawn. Personal Website Twitter/X GitHub LinkedIn Infinite Red Into the Dawn on Steam

This week we're joined by Joel Griffith, the founder and CEO of Browserless. Browserless is a browser automation service that allows you to run headless browsers in the cloud. We talk about the challenges of running headless browsers at scale, the use cases for browser automation, and the future of browser automation. We also discuss the BrowserQL feature, which allows you to query the web using a SQL-like language. Website: browserless.io Documentation: docs.browserless.io GitHub: github.com/browserless/browserless (12.3k stars) GitHub (Personal): github.com/joelgriffith Twitter/X: @browserless LinkedIn: Joel Griffith

This week we're joined by Dana Lawson, CTO at Netlify. We talk about her journey from the US Army to leading engineering teams at companies like GitHub, New Relic, and now Netlify. We discuss Netlify's evolution from JAMstack to AI-powered developer tools, including Agent Runners and their MCP server. We also explore the concept of "Agent Experience" (AX) as a new paradigm alongside UX and DX, and how hiring practices are evolving in the age of AI. Netlify: https://www.netlify.com/ Agent Experience Hub: https://www.netlify.com/agent-experience/ agentexperience.ax: https://agentexperience.ax/ Agent Runners: https://www.netlify.com/platform/agent-runners/ Netlify MCP Server: https://docs.netlify.com/build/build-with-ai/netlify-mcp-server/ Dana on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dglawson/ Dana's LeadDev Profile: https://leaddev.com/community/dana-lawson Dana's UXDX Profile: https://uxdx.com/profile/dana-lawson/

This week we're joined by Fabian Hiller, the creator of Valibot, Standard Schema, and Formish. We talk about the birth of Valibot, the collaboration between all the schema libraries on Standard Schema, and the new Formish library. We also discuss the future of developer tools and AI integration. GitHub: https://github.com/fabian-hiller Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/fabianhiller.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fabianhiller/ Valibot — https://valibot.dev/ Standard Schema — https://standardschema.dev/ Formisch — https://formisch.dev/

This week we're joined by Salma Alam-Naylor, the Head of Developer Education at Nordcraft. Salma shares her journey from music teacher to developer, her discovery of the developer education space in 2020, and the challenges and opportunities she's faced in her role. We discuss the importance of visual editors in web development, the illusion of complexity in development, and the future of web development. Salma also introduces Nordcraft, a visual web framework that allows you to build websites with a GUI. https://whitep4nth3r.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/whitep4nth3r/?originalSubdomain=uk https://github.com/whitep4nth3r https://nordcraft.com/

This week we're joined by Peter van Hardenberg (PVH), director of the Ink and Switch research lab and co-author of the seminal Local First Software paper.Peter shares the origin story of local-first software, from his realization on a San Francisco train to his work at Heroku and beyond.We dive deep into Automerge, Ink and Switch's local-first sync engine built on CRDTs (Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types), exploring how it enables real-time collaboration while keeping data on your computer.We discuss the technical challenges of building distributed systems, the philosophy behind local-first software, and how projects like Key Hive are pushing the boundaries of decentralized data access.Peter also shares his vision for the future of computing, where software ownership and interoperability become fundamental principles rather than afterthoughts. https://www.pvh.ca https://www.inkandswitch.com https://automerge.org https://github.com/automerge/automerge https://github.com/pvh