[Dev Catch Up #61] - Codex CLI, Claude Code best practices, MCP gateway, Diskless Kafka, MacOS package manager, Rowboat, VSCode Agent Mode, Cloud Snitch and Much More!
Bringing devs up to speed on the latest dev news from the trends including, a bunch of exciting developments and articles
Welcome to the 61st edition of DevShorts, Dev Catch Up!
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Must Read
Anthropic has released a post on best practices for AI Agent development, sharing effective tips and tricks for Claude Code. If you're using Claude Code as your coding agent, this post is definitely worth a look.
Following last week’s model launches, OpenAI is keeping the momentum with Codex CLI, a new competitor to Claude Code. The tool still needs lot of work, as the output quality is just okay for now, but it is a notable addition to open-source terminal coding agents. Check the GitHub repo for more details.
[Sponsored] Diskless Kafka? Imagine a streaming world where Kafka infrastructure costs are reduced by up to 80%. This is exactly what’s possible through local disks in tandem with object storage. Proposed by Aiven and if accepted, this Kafka innovation would offload disk replication to object storage (like S3), dramatically reducing costs, keeping flexibility and scalability high, and remaining fully open source. Read the full Kafka Improvement Proposal.
As top models now integrate web search, Simon Willison shares insights on how web search is becoming more reliable with models like OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini. A good read if you want to know which model performs better with web search.
OSS Highlight of the Week
If you are a macOS user, exploring alternatives to Homebrew, check out sps, a new Rust-based package manager. Inspired by Homebrew, it manages both CLI tools and desktop apps, offering features like parallel downloads, automatic dependency resolution, and the ability to build from source. Still in alpha, but a promising project to explore on GitHub.
Good to know
If you're using VS Code, this new demo might be helpful. Microsoft’s Burke Holland showcased how to use Agent Mode, MCP servers, and PRD documents in VS Code to build a full app, complete with a database. Check this video to effectively use VS Code.
I have built many multi-tenant apps, and one thing I always felt hard about them is setting up authentication and scaling the backend efficiently. This guide shows how Clerk for auth and Supabase for backend can simplify the process.
AWS admins and developers need to stay current with AWS documentation changes. Miggo's new Dashboard automatically tracks AWS documentation updates and changes. A helpful page for people who frequently access AWS docs for security.
T-strings are coming in Python to make string handling safer and more flexible. Unlike f-strings, t-strings defer evaluation, helping prevent issues with user input. Read detailed post here.
If you manage AWS Cloud, check out Cloud Snitch. It is a smart activity tracker for your AWS cloud, and it helps you see who did what, spot suspicious behavior, and tighten your security easily. Check the GitHub repo for more details like how to configure and etc.
Notable FYIs
MCP is evolving rapidly, and we have been covering MCP-related updates frequently. MCP Gateway is an intermediary solution between LLMs and MCP servers and it manages, routes, and secures interactions between them. Check out the GitHub repo if you find it useful.
React's latest update introduces two new features that make animations much easier to implement. Check out these features in the React Labs post, and it is worth exploring if you are working on React UI components.
I know how difficult it can be, to handle memory issues in Node.js apps. Platformatic’s new guide on tuning V8's garbage collection helps prevent those frustrating latency spikes and crashes. This resource could save you hours of debugging time and improve your application's performance.
If you’re exploring multi-agent workflows, you should definitely check out Rowboat. It’s an open-source platform for building agent workflows with natural language, MCP tools, and visual debugging. Explore more in their GitHub repo.
If you manage your own infrastructure or handle cloud administration, this is important to know. TLS certificate lifetime will decrease to 47 days by March 2029. Start planning for automated cert renewals, as manual renewal will soon become impractical. Read more details in the digicert page.