Selection Criteria
I look for developer tools which fall into two categories:
- AI Powered Dev Tools - More strictly 'dev tools' in the conventional sense to make you a more efficient developer, but they themselves are powered by AI (e.g., Gemini CLI, Cline)
- AI Development Tools - Tools that help developers who are using AI in their projects to build end user functionality (e.g., agentic search frameworks, LLM observability tooling)
In time, it's likely that most tooling will be for or powered-by AI so these distinctions will be less relevant - however in this shoulder period as we are all re-tooling our own minds, it's definitely relevant.
I'm constantly trying out and searching for new tools both at work and at home, but I only include the best ones here. While of course inclusions are subjective, the better you adhere to the below list the more likely I will include you:
> newly released (from the past 2 months)
> have relatively broad developer applicability
> have staying power (trying to predict and avoid abandoned projects)
> obviously good DX
> modern approaches to design
> some traction (but not too much)
> self service, either open source or a free tier
> well documented and easy to use
If you're a developer building dev tools, I'd love to hear from you! I'm always looking for new tools to add to the list newsletter@contours.dev.
About Me
I'm a partner and developer at Defiant, building our internal and external products. We use a bunch of AI and data science to help us understand startups and we also focus our investing on more technical products like developer tooling, databases, alternative data companies, and broader B2B SaaS. Always happy to chat about all things technical and beyond, you can find me here.