What's new in DevEx - January 15

AI adoption is moving beyond enterprises. Pentagon’s decision to partner with Grok marks a shift in how governments are approaching AI. This certainly carries geopolitical and security implications, evals and guardrails will need to be more vigorous the ever. Could this be an indicator of rapid government adoption of AI this year?

OpenAI just acquired Torch for $100 million to unify fragmented patient data into a single medical memory layer for ChatGPT Health. Anthropic instantly followed with Claude for Healthcare. This will likely hurt a ton of healthcare AI startups, but those that focus on being a data source for existing AI tools will likely come out on top.

Apple announced a partnership with Google to integrate Gemini models into Siri as part of Apple Intelligence. This is a rare shift for Apple, as the move prioritizes capability and speed over vertical integration. Shows that even platform owners are willing to outsource intelligence if it improves user-facing systems fast enough.

Imagine if AI could access your desktop and organize all files for you. Claude Cowork does exactly that. The best part is, Anthropic claims it was mostly built using Claude itself. AI is clearly moving from assisting to executing. Production-grade tools built entirely by AI are becoming a norm, and companies need to embrace it to stay ahead.

Vercel open-sourced bash-tool, the execution engine that lets you easily give context without filling up context windows. Instead of pasting large context into prompts, agents use commands like find, grep, and pipes to fetch only what they need. For developers, this keeps context local, lowers costs, and improves agent reliability.

DeepSeek V4 is set to release in February, and early reports show it outperforms OpenAI and Anthropic on coding tasks, driven by stronger long-context handling. The advantage appears in handling large, multi-file codebases and extended refactors without losing coherence. Clear signal that context is becoming a key differentiator.

DocsAlot is an AI-native documentation platform built for both humans and agents. It keeps docs automatically in sync with code and product changes, producing structured, high-quality documentation that developers, non-technical teammates, and AI agents can reliably consume.

It listens to real product signals, like Slack or Discord conversations and customer requests, turning them into up-to-date documentation, tutorials, and technical content as your product evolves. The tool is seeing high adoption rates just weeks after launch. Check it out if documentation drift is a real problem for your team.

January 20: Assembled is doing a deep dive on improving agent performance in production, with a panel of engineers from Open AI, Harvey, LangChain and Cartesia.

January 22: Antler is hosting a technical fireside chat with the founder of data.world, a data governance platform that was acquired by ServiceNow last year.

January 23: Stan is organizing a hackathon for building video editing tools, with the grand prize of $25K (plus a chance to join their growing team).

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