WELCOME | Hey all! Welcome back to The Frontier, Product Huntβs weekly AI newsletter. This edition, weβve got Elonβs newest AI app, a behind-the-scenes chat about AI dev tools between our engineers, and a plug for all of the amazing stories weβve recently published on the site. Letβs get into it! | | TOP LAUNCHES | Elonβs newest AI app | | TOP LAUNCHES | Grok for iOS is the official app from xAI. Itβs designed to be maximally truthful, useful, and curious. You can get answers to any question, generate striking images, and upload and analyze pictures. | Humiris automatically optimizes the accuracy and cost of your GenAI models. You can integrate GPT 4o, Sonnet 3.5 and more to achieve more accuracy compared to general reasoning models. | Sagehood creates AI agents to analyze the US stock market. You can use it to get AI-driven insights, personalized stock picks, and portfolio analysis. | TestSprite bills itself as the βfirst AI end-to-end testing agentβ for small developer teams. It manages frontend and backend processes, can generate test cases and write test code, diagnose issues, and even propose patches. | Topview lets you showcase your products with AI avatars. You can upload a product image and let digital avatars hold and present it β an ideal tool for eCommerce and marketing. |
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| | THE BIG IDEA | Was 2024 the year of AI dev tools? | | On our Golden Kitties Slack channel, our CEO (Rajiv Ayyangar), CTO (Mike Kerzhner), and staff engineer (Matt Carroll) briefly debated whether 2024 was the year of the AI developer tool. We found their discussion fascinating, and feature an edited excerpt of it below. (N.B. This was first featured in our Sunday weekly newsletter, The Roundup.) | Rajiv: Was 2024 the year of AI dev tools? E.g. Supabase, Cursor, Replitβ¦ | Mike K: It has been the year of βAll knowing, sloppy engineer at your fingertips.β | Rajiv: As a non-developer, Iβm envious of how much AI seems to have accelerated coding. I donβt feel AI has changed my life that much. Maybe this coming year it will. cough cough, Iβm looking at you Siri. | Matt: More of a meta discussion, but Iβve found it hard to really leverage AI unless I know what is happening and Iβm quickly able to audit / fix up. | Mike K: We no longer program. We just give feedback to an eager, fast, and loose intern. | Matt: Yes, exactly. I recently learned a new language that was pretty unfamiliar and letting the AI βrun freeβ was rough. It would inherently break something and keep digging itself deeper to resolve the problem. Without understanding myself I couldnβt really fix it either.
The flow I wound up using was: Use AI for help with very narrow scope feature, test and integrate it correctly myself (making sure I understand), iterate. | Basically there is this equation: The greater I understand a language the more slack I can grant the AI to do work, because Iβll be able to quickly fix its mistakes. | Mike K: Yup. 2024 has been the year of βdeveloper autocomplete.β We went from autocompleting words to autocompleting functions, classes, features and codebases. But autocomplete only works if you are a good human editor and curator. And itβs hard to become a good editor unless you are a skilled writer. | Thatβs why I am really curious to see what happens to programmers in 2025 and beyond. Folks who donβt know how to ride a bike are given F1 cars. But itβs hard to drive an F1 car if you have no idea how things in motion behave. |
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