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