Reviews

Building AI apps and agents with Microsoft Foundry

Microsoft’s Azure-based AI development and deployment platform shines with a strong selection of models and agent types and an excellent playground for experimenting with agents.

By Martin Heller

May 6, 202616 mins

Development ToolsGenerative AIMicrosoft Azure

Qwen Code is good but not great

Qwen Code’s Qwen3-Coder model doesn’t seem as good as its benchmark scores imply, but the tools are free and the usage limits are generous.

By Martin Heller

Sep 16, 2025 32 mins

Artificial Intelligence Development Tools Generative AI

Retrieval-augmented generation with Nvidia NeMo Retriever

Nvidia’s NeMo Retriever models and RAG pipeline make quick work of ingesting PDFs and generating reports based on them. Chalk one up for the plan-reflect-refine architecture.

By Martin Heller

Aug 19, 2025 9 mins

Development Tools Generative AI Libraries and Frameworks

Roo Code review: Autonomous AI-powered development in the IDE

Roo Code is among the first wave of autonomous coding agents built directly into the IDE. Here’s a first look at AI-powered application development with Roo and Gemini inside VS Code.

By Matthew Tyson

Aug 6, 2025 13 mins

Development Tools JavaScript TypeScript

AI coding at the command line with Gemini CLI

Gemini CLI and its gemini-2.5-pro model don’t quite match Claude Code or Solver, but they can get you pretty far without paying for a subscription or for usage.

By Martin Heller

Jul 22, 2025 16 mins

Artificial Intelligence Development Tools Generative AI

Real-time analytics with StarTree Cloud and Apache Pinot

Open-source distributed OLAP database and powerful SaaS counterpart shine with plug-in indexes, signature tunable star-tree index, and ability to combine batch data with streaming data.

By Martin Heller

Jun 3, 2025 16 mins

Big Data Databases SaaS

Review: Zencoder has a vision for AI coding

Zencoder takes an innovative approach to code generation and repair, ‘grokking’ whole repos for context and using an error-corrected inference pipeline. It’s still wet behind the ears.

By Martin Heller

Mar 5, 2025 8 mins

Development Tools Generative AI Software Development

Review: Gemini Code Assist is good at coding

Google’s AI coding assistant can help you write, test, debug, and document your code, but currently lacks whole-repo code generation and agents for long-running coding tasks.

By Martin Heller

Feb 25, 2025 11 mins

Artificial Intelligence Development Tools Generative AI

First look: Solver can code that for you

Do you want to delegate a software engineering task to an AI agent and leave it to work on the problem by itself? Solver may be able to help you.

By Martin Heller

Feb 3, 2025 15 mins

Artificial Intelligence Development Tools Generative AI

ChatGPT o1-preview excels at code generationimplementation

OpenAI’s latest generative AI model is much better at code generation than previous models, but slower and more expensive — and not quite ready for production.

By Martin Heller

Oct 6, 2024 57 mins

Artificial Intelligence Development Tools Generative AI

Two good Visual Studio Code alternatives

Zed, Eclipse Theia IDE, Lite XL, and Cursor all offer some advantages over VS Code, at least for now. Zed and Cursor stand apart.

By Martin Heller

Oct 1, 2024 15 mins

Development Tools Software Development

Haystack review: A flexible LLM app builder

Haystack is an easy open-source framework for building RAG pipelines and LLM-powered applications, and the foundation for a handy SaaS platform for managing their life cycle.

By Martin Heller

Sep 9, 2024 12 mins

Artificial Intelligence Generative AI Libraries and Frameworks

Review: Tabnine AI coding assistant flexes its models

Tabnine aces AI-powered coding with multiple levels of context, private and protected proprietary models, and multiple selectable models for chat.

By Martin Heller

Aug 12, 2024 12 mins

Artificial Intelligence Development Tools Generative AI

Qdrant review: A highly flexible option for vector search

Vector database offers on-prem, cloud-native, or SaaS deployment, leading performance, a rich set of integrations and language drivers, and a dizzying array of optimization options.

By Martin Heller

Jul 29, 2024 14 mins

Artificial Intelligence Databases Generative AI

Semantic Kernel: Diving into Microsoft’s AI orchestration SDK

Microsoft’s toolkit for building generative AI applications goes beyond function calling to generate its own plans, using LLMs and templates to fulfill user requests. And it’s reasonably easy to learn and use.

By Martin Heller

Jul 22, 2024 15 mins

Artificial Intelligence Generative AI Software Development

Theia IDE: Eclipse’s answer to Visual Studio Code

Want VS Code's functionality without Microsoft? Eclipse's Theia IDE project offers an alternative.

By Serdar Yegulalp

Jul 17, 2024 7 mins

Development Tools Software Development

Amazon Q Developer review: Code completions, code chat, and AWS skills

Amazon Q Developer works well for completing lines of code, doc strings, and if/for/while/try code blocks, but can’t generate full functions for certain use cases.

By Martin Heller

Jun 24, 2024 18 mins

Amazon Web Services Development Tools Generative AI

LlamaIndex review: Easy context-augmented LLM applications

Free open-source framework integrates with scads of vector stores, LLMs, and data sources and works for Q&A, structured extraction, chat, semantic search, and agent use cases.

By Martin Heller

Jun 17, 2024 9 mins

Development Tools Generative AI Libraries and Frameworks

Google Project IDX: A promising next-generation cloud IDE

Project IDX shines with a VS Code look and feel, GitHub integration, workspace sharing, and AI-powered coding assistance.

By Martin Heller

Jun 3, 2024 7 mins

Development Tools Google Cloud Platform Technology Industry

DuckDB: The tiny but powerful analytics database

You don't need big, bulky tools to do columnar data analytics. DuckDB fits a powerful analytics database into a tool light enough to run on your laptop.

By Serdar Yegulalp

May 15, 2024 5 mins

Analytics Databases Python