DevToolsDigest: September 7th, 2023
This week's digest includes news and resources from Imbue, Wired, and more.

Have feedback for us on the DevToolsDigest, or have something to share in the next issue? Email us at [email protected]
The Week in Developer Tools
Today, OpenTelemetry is the second most active project in the CNCF, behind only Kubernetes in popularity. Its contributors are spread across all major observability vendors and its protocol has near-universal adoption among observability providers.
So you’re a coder, and you’ve been asked to integrate with ChatGPT. What do you need to know? LLMs are nondeterministic. They’re not well-behaved by software standards. But they can do stuff that code can’t, like respond usefully to vague instructions. We have some learning to do in order to integrate them into otherwise-deterministic software.
Industry Research
Conferences around DevRel and Community tend to have talks which are 101-level, espousing what DevRel is/isn’t in some weird formula, while providing very little in the way of actionable steps or framework to be applied. It's really hard to put together a framework or flowchart for a discipline that varies wildly.
A few years ago, the discussion forum Hacker News developed a quirk. A new phrase had entered the coder lexicon. The phrase—“local-first software”— had an artisanal, farm-to-table sort of ring, at once familiar and flicking at something new.
Developer Venture News
Imbue launched out of stealth last October with an ambitious goal: to research the fundamentals of human intelligence that machines currently lack. The company’s approach seems to have shifted somewhat since then. Rather than unleash AI on 3D worlds, Imbue says that it’s developing models it finds “internally useful” to start, including models that can code.