You signed up for Open Pioneers or opensourcealternative.to, and then I disappeared for about a year. The newsletter is back with a new name: Emerging DevTools.
Every Friday I pick 5 new devtools that developers are talking about. The ones I want to play with over the weekend. If that's not for you, the unsubscribe link is at the bottom.
1. Let Claude search your WhatsApp
I'm tempted to set this up: whatsapp-mcp, an MCP server that lets Claude search your personal WhatsApp, running for free on Cloudflare. I'd test it on a spare number first, because WhatsApp bans accounts that use unofficial clients.
2. Let an AI drive your iPhone for $7
My favorite of the week is esp32-iphone-agent. A $7 board plugs into an iPhone as a keyboard and mouse, and an AI model drives the phone through AirPlay. You don't need a Mac or a jailbreak. It's a little absurd and I love it.
3. A Rust Redis with vector search
KiviDB is a Redis-compatible cache with vector search, written in Rust by someone who got fed up with Dragonfly running out of memory. I like projects that start from a real production headache.
4. Pay for the LLM once, then run it for free
Strot uses a big model like Claude once to turn a decision task, such as routing tickets or scoring feedback, into a small local model that runs on CPU at about 60 ms per record. Paying for the intelligence once is an interesting thought. I'll be watching where this goes.
5. Get quizzed on your AI's code before you push
Sphinx is an open source hook for your coding agent workflow: every time you push to prod, it asks you a few questions about the code you're shipping. I'm not sure I'd leave it switched on, but keeping an understanding of the AI-written code you ship becomes more and more of a problem.
Building a devtool, or found one I should know about? Hit reply. I'd love to hear about it.
Jonathan