Enable javascript in your browser for better experience. Need to know to enable it? Go here.
Volume 32 | April 2025

Tools

Tools

Adopt ?

  • 51. Renovate

    Renovate has become the tool of choice for many of our teams looking to take a proactive approach to dependency version management. While Dependabot remains a safe default choice for GitHub-hosted repositories, we continue to recommend evaluating Renovate as a more comprehensive and customizable solution. To maximize Renovate’s benefits, configure it to monitor and update all dependencies, including tooling, infrastructure and private or internally hosted dependencies. To reduce developer fatigue, consider automatic merging of dependency update PRs.

  • 52. uv

    Since the last Radar, we’ve gained more experience with uv, and feedback from teams has been overwhelmingly positive. uv is a next-generation Python package and project management tool written in Rust, with a key value proposition: it’s "extremely fast." It outperforms other Python package managers by a large margin in benchmarks, accelerating build and test cycles and significantly improving developer experience. Beyond performance, uv offers a unified toolset, effectively replacing tools like Poetry, pyenv and pipx. However, our concerns around package management tools remain: a strong ecosystem, mature community and long-term support are critical. Given that uv is relatively new, moving it to the Adopt ring is bold. That said, many data teams are eager to move away from Python’s legacy package management system, and our frontline developers consistently recommend uv as the best tool available today.

  • 53. Vite

    Since Vite was last mentioned in the Radar, it has gained even more traction. It’s a high-performance front-end build tool with fast hot-reloading. It’s being adopted and recommended as a default choice in many front-end frameworks, including Vue, SvelteKit and React which recently deprecated create-react-app. Vite also recently received significant investment, which led to the founding of VoidZero, an organization dedicated to Vite’s development. This investment should accelerate development and enhance the project's long-term sustainability.

Trial ?

  • 54. Claude Sonnet

    Claude Sonnet is an advanced language model that excels in coding, writing, analysis and visual processing. It's available in the browser, terminal, most major IDEs and even integrates with GitHub Copilot. As of writing, benchmarking shows it outperforms previous models with versions 3.5 and 3.7, including earlier Claude models. It's also adept at interpreting charts and extracting text from images, and it features a developer-focused experience, such as with the "Artifacts" feature in the browser UI for generating and interacting with dynamic content such as code snippets and HTML designs.

    We’ve used version 3.5 of Claude Sonnet extensively in software development and found it significantly boosts productivity across various projects. It excels in greenfield projects, particularly in collaborative software design and architectural discussions. While it may be too early to call any AI model "stable" for coding assistance, Claude Sonnet is among the most reliable models we've worked with. At the time of writing, Claude 3.7 has also been released and is promising, though we’ve not yet fully tested it in production.

  • 55. Cline

    Cline is an open-source VSCode extension that is currently one of the strongest contenders in the space of supervised software engineering agents. It lets developers drive their implementation entirely from the Cline chat, integrating seamlessly with the IDE they already use. Key features like Plan & Act mode, transparent token usage and MCP integration help developers interact effectively with LLMs. Cline has demonstrated advanced capabilities in handling complex development tasks, especially with Claude 3.5 Sonnet. It supports large codebases, automates headless browser testing and proactively fixes bugs. Unlike cloud-based solutions, Cline enhances privacy by storing data locally. Its open-source nature not only ensures greater transparency but also enables community-driven improvements. However, developers should be mindful of token usage cost, as Cline's code context orchestration, while very effective, is resource-intensive. Another potential bottleneck is rate limiting, which can slow down workflows. Until this is resolved, using API providers like OpenRouter, which provide better rate limits, is advisable.

  • 56. Cursor

    We continue to be impressed by the AI-first code editor Cursor, which remains a leader in the competitive AI coding assistance space. Its code context orchestration is very effective, and it supports a wide range of models, including the option to use a custom API key. The Cursor team often comes up with innovative user experience features before the other vendors, and they include an extensive list of context providers in their chat, such as the referencing of git diffs, previous AI conversations, web search, library documentation and MCP integration. Alongside tools like Cline and Windsurf, Cursor also stands out for its strong agentic coding mode. This mode allows developers to guide their implementation directly from an AI chat interface, with the tool autonomously reading and modifying files, as well as executing commands. Additionally, we appreciate Cursor's ability to detect linting and compilation errors in generated code and proactively correct them.

  • 57. D2

    D2 is an open-source diagrams-as-code tool that helps users create and customize diagrams from text. It introduces the D2 diagram scripting language, which prioritizes readability over compactness with a simple, declarative syntax. D2 ships with a default theme and leverages the same layout engine as Mermaid. Our teams appreciate its lightweight syntax, which is specifically designed for software documentation and architecture diagrams.

  • 58. Databricks Delta Live Tables

    Delta Live Tables (DLT) continues to prove its value in simplifying and streamlining data pipeline management, supporting both real-time streaming and batch processing through a declarative approach. By automating complex data engineering tasks, such as manual checkpoint management, DLT reduces operational overhead while ensuring a robust end-to-end system. Its ability to orchestrate simple pipelines with minimal manual intervention enhances reliability and flexibility, while features like materialized views provide incremental updates and performance optimization for specific use cases.

    However, teams must understand DLT’s nuances to fully leverage its benefits and avoid potential pitfalls. As an opinionated abstraction, DLT manages its own tables and restricts data insertion to a single pipeline at a time. Streaming tables are append-only, requiring careful design considerations. Additionally, deleting a DLT pipeline also deletes the underlying table and data, potentially creating operational issues.

  • 59. JSON Crack

    JSON Crack is a Visual Studio Code extension that renders interactive graphs from textual data. Despite its name it supports multiple formats, including YAML, TOML and XML. Unlike Mermaid and D2, where the textual form is a means to create a specific visual graph, JSON Crack is a tool to look at data that happens to be in a textual format. The layout algorithm works well and the tool allows selective hiding of branches and nodes, making it a great choice for exploring data sets. A companion web-based tool is also available, but our reservations about relying on online services for formatting or parsing code apply. JSON Crack does have a node limit, and directs users to a commercial sibling tool for handling files with more than a few hundred nodes.

  • 60. MailSlurp

    Testing workflows that involve email are often complex and time-consuming. Development teams must build custom email API clients for automation while also setting up temporary inboxes for manual testing scenarios, such as user testing or internal product training before major releases. These challenges become even more pronounced when developing customer onboarding products. We’ve had a positive experience with MailSlurp, a mail server and SMS API service. It provides REST APIs for creating inboxes and phone numbers as well as validating emails and messages directly in code, and its no-code dashboard is also useful for manual testing preparations. Additional features like custom domains, webhooks, auto-reply and forwarding are worth checking out for more complex scenarios.

  • 61. Metabase

    Metabase is an open-source analytics and business intelligence tool that allows users to visualize and analyze data from a variety of data sources, including relational and NoSQL databases. The tool helps users create visualizations and reports, organize them into dashboards and easily share insights. It also offers an SDK for embedding interactive dashboards in web applications, matching the theme and style of the application — making it developer-friendly. With both officially supported and community-backed data connectors, Metabase is versatile across data environments. As a lightweight BI tool, our teams find it useful for managing interactive dashboards and reports in their applications.

  • 62. NeMo Guardrails

    NeMo Guardrails is an easy-to-use open-source toolkit from NVIDIA that empowers developers to implement guardrails for LLMs used in conversational applications. Since we last mentioned it in the Radar, NeMo has seen significant adoption across our teams and continues to improve. Many of the latest enhancements to NeMo Guardrails focus on expanding integrations and strengthening security, data and control, aligning with the project’s core goal.

    A major update to NeMo’s documentation has improved usability and new integrations have been added, including AutoAlign and Patronus Lynx, along with support for Colang 2.0. Key upgrades include enhancements to content safety and security as well as a recent release that supports streaming LLM content through output rails for improved performance. We've also seen added support for Prompt Security. Additionally, Nvidia released three new microservices: content safety NIM microservice, topic control NIM microservice and jailbreak detection, all of which have been integrated with NeMo Guardrails.

    Based on its growing feature set and increased usage in production, we’re moving NeMo Guardrails to Trial. We recommend reviewing the latest release notes for a complete overview of the changes since our last blip.

  • 63. Nyx

    Nyx is a versatile semantic release tool that supports a wide range of software engineering projects. It’s language-agnostic and works with all major CI and SCM platforms, making it highly adaptable. While many teams use semantic versioning in trunk-based development, Nyx also supports workflows like Gitflow, OneFlow and GitHub Flow. One key advantage of Nyx in production is its automatic changelog generation, with built-in support for Conventional Commits.

    As noted in previous Radar editions, we caution against development patterns that rely on long-lived branches (e.g., Gitflow, GitOps), as they introduce challenges that even powerful tools like Nyx cannot mitigate. We highly recommend trying Nyx in CI/CD workflows, especially for trunk-based development, where we’ve seen repeated success.

  • 64. OpenRewrite

    OpenRewrite continues to serve us well as a tool for large-scale refactorings that follow a set of rules such as moving to a new API version of a widely used library or applying updates to many services that were created from the same template. Support for languages beyond Java, notably JavaScript, has been introduced. With short LTS release cycles in frameworks like Angular, keeping projects updated to newer versions has become increasingly important. OpenRewrite supports this process effectively. Using an AI coding assistant is an alternative, but for rule-based changes, it’s usually slower, more expensive and less reliable. We like that OpenRewrite comes bundled with a catalog of recipes (rules), which describe the changes to be made. The refactoring engine, bundled recipes and build tool plugins are open-source software, which makes it easier for teams to reach for OpenRewrite when they need it.

  • 65. Plerion

    Plerion is an AWS-focused cloud security platform that integrates with hosting providers to uncover risks, misconfigurations and vulnerabilities across your cloud infrastructure, servers and applications. Similar to Wiz, Plerion uses risk-based prioritization for detected issues, promising to let you "focus on the 1% that matters." Our teams report positive experiences with Plerion, noting it has provided our clients with significant insights and reinforced the importance of proactive security monitoring for their organizations.

  • 66. Software engineering agents

    Since we last wrote about software engineering agents six months ago, the industry still lacks a shared definition of the term "agent." However, a major development has emerged — not in fully autonomous coding agents (which remain unconvincing) but in supervised agentic modes within the IDE. These modes allow developers to drive implementation via chat, with tools not only modifying code in multiple files but also executing commands, running tests and responding to IDE feedback like linting or compile errors.

    This approach, sometimes called chat-oriented programming (CHOP) or prompt-to-code, keeps developers in control while shifting more responsibility to AI than traditional coding assistants like auto-suggestions. Leading tools in this space include Cursor, Cline and Windsurf, with GitHub Copilot slightly behind but catching up. The usefulness of these agentic modes depends on both the model used (with Claude's Sonnet series the current state of the art) and how well the tool integrates with the IDE to provide a good developer experience.

    We've found these workflows intriguing and promising, with a notable increase in coding speed. However, keeping problem scopes small helps developers better review AI-generated changes. This works best with low-abstraction prompts and AI-friendly codebases that are well-structured and properly tested. As these modes improve, they’ll also heighten the risk of complacency with AI-generated code. To mitigate this, employ pair programming and other disciplined review practices, especially for production code.

  • 67. Tuple

    Tuple, a tool optimized for remote pair programming, was originally designed to fill the gap left by Slack’s Screenhero. Since we last mentioned it in the Radar, it has seen wider adoption, addressed previous quirks and constraints and now supports Windows. A key improvement is enhanced desktop sharing with a built-in privacy feature, allowing users to hide private app windows (such as text messages) while sharing tools like the browser window. Previously, UI limitations made Tuple feel like a pair programming tool rather than a general collaboration tool. With these updates, users can now collaborate on content beyond the IDE.

    However, it’s important to note that the remote pair has access to the entire desktop. If not configured properly, this could be a security concern, especially if the pair is not trustworthy. We strongly recommend educating teams on Tuple’s privacy settings, best practices and etiquette before use.

    We encourage teams to try the latest version of Tuple in your development workflow. It aligns with our pragmatic remote pairing recommendation, offering low-latency pairing, an intuitive UX and significant usability improvements.

  • 68. Turborepo

    Turborepo helps manage large JavaScript or TypeScript monorepos by analyzing, caching, parallelizing and optimizing build tasks to speed up the process. In large monorepos, projects often depend on each other; rebuilding all dependencies for every change is inefficient and time-consuming, but Turborepo makes this easier. Unlike Nx, Turborepo's default setup uses multiple package.json files — one per project — which allows having dependencies with different versions (multiple versions of React, for example) in a single monorepo, which Nx discourages. While this might be considered an anti-pattern, it does address certain use cases, like migrating from multi- to monorepo, where teams may temporarily require multiple versions of dependencies. In our experience, TurboRepo is quite simple to set up and performs well.

Assess ?

  • 69. AnythingLLM

    AnythingLLM 是一个开源桌面应用程序,可以与大型文档或内容交互,支持开箱即用的大语言模型(LLMs)和向量数据库集成。它具备可插拔的嵌入模型架构,可以与大多数商业化 LLM 以及由 Ollama 管理的开源模型一起使用。除了支持 检索增强生成(RAG) 模式外,用户还可以创建和组织不同技能作为代理(agents)来执行自定义任务和工作流。AnythingLLM 允许用户将文档和交互分组到不同的工作空间中,这些工作空间类似于长生命周期的线程,每个线程都有独立的上下文。最近,它还新增了通过简单的 Docker 镜像部署为多用户 Web 应用的功能。一些团队已将其用作本地个人助手,发现它是一个强大且实用的工具。

  • 70. Gemma Scope

    机械解释性(Mechanistic Interpretability)——理解大型语言模型的内部运行机制——正在成为一个日益重要的领域。像 Gemma Scope 和开源库 Mishax 这样的工具,为 Gemma2 系列开源模型提供了深入的洞察。这些解释性工具在调试模型的意外行为、识别导致幻觉、偏见或其他失败案例的组件方面发挥了关键作用,并通过提供更深入的可见性来建立对模型的信任。虽然这一领域对研究人员尤其具有吸引力,但需要注意的是,随着 DeepSeek-R1 的近期发布,模型训练正在成为超越传统大玩家的更多企业的可行选择。随着生成式 AI 的不断发展,解释性与安全性的重要性只会与日俱增。

  • 71. Hurl

    Hurl 是处理一系列 HTTP 请求的利器,这些请求可通过使用 Hurl 特定语法的纯文本文件定义。除了发送请求以外,Hurl 还可以验证响应数据,确保请求返回特定的 HTTP 状态码,使用 XPATH, JSONPath 或者正则表达式断言响应头和内容,以及提取相应数据到变量之中,以便在链式请求之中调用。

    凭借这些特性,Hurl 不仅可以胜任简单的 API 自动化工作,而且也能作为 API 的自动测试工具使用。它支持生成基于 HTML 或 JSON 格式的详细测试报告,这使它在测试流程中更具实用性。虽然像 Bruno 和 Postman 这样的专业工具提供了图形用户界面以及更丰富的功能,但 Hurl 更以简洁著称。和同样使用纯文本文件的Bruno类似,Hurl 的测试文件也可以存储在代码仓库中。

  • 72. Jujutsu

    Git 是当前占据主导地位的分布式版本控制系统(VCS),拥有绝大多数的市场份额。然而,尽管 Git 已在过去十多年中占据主导地位,开发者仍然在其复杂的分支、合并、变基以及冲突解决工作流中苦苦挣扎。这种持续的挫败感催生了一系列旨在缓解痛点的工具——有些通过可视化方式简化复杂性,有些则提供图形界面以完全抽象操作过程。

    Jujutsu 更进一步,提供了一个完整的 Git 替代方案,同时通过 使用 Git 仓库作为存储后端 保持兼容性。这使开发者能够继续使用现有的 Git 服务器和服务,同时受益于 Jujutsu 简化的工作流。Jujutsu 将自己定位为“既简单又强大”,强调为不同经验水平的开发者提供易用性。其一大亮点是 一流的冲突解决功能,这一特性有潜力显著改善开发者的使用体验。

  • 73. kubenetmon

    监控和理解与 Kubernetes 相关的网络流量可能是一项挑战,尤其是当您的基础设施跨多个可用区、区域或云时。由 ClickHouse 构建并最近开源的 kubenetmon,旨在通过提供主要云提供商之间详尽的 Kubernetes 数据传输计量解决这一问题。如果您正在运行 Kubernetes 并对账单中不清晰的数据传输成本感到困扰,不妨探索一下 kubenetmon。

  • 74. Mergiraf

    解决合并冲突可能是软件开发中最不受欢迎的活动之一。尽管有一些技术可以减少合并的复杂性,例如实践持续集成(按照其原意至少每天合并到共享主干),但我们仍看到在合并上花费了过多的精力。长期功能分支 是一个原因,而 AI 辅助编码也往往会增加变更集的规模。Mergiraf 可能是一个解决方案——这是一款新工具,通过查看语法树而不是将代码视为文本行来解决合并冲突。作为一个 git 合并驱动程序,它可以被配置为让 git 子命令(如 mergecherry-pick)自动使用 Mergiraf,而不是默认的合并算法,从而显著提高合并效率和准确性。

  • 75. ModernBERT

    BERT(Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers)的继任者 ModernBERT 是一系列新一代的 encoder-only transformer 模型,专为广泛的自然语言处理(NLP)任务设计。作为一个可直接替代 BERT 的升级版本,ModernBERT 不仅提升了性能和准确性,还解决了 BERT 的一些局限——特别是通过引入“交替注意力”(Alternating Attention)实现了对极长上下文长度的支持。 对于有 NLP 需求的团队,在默认选择 通用生成式模型 之前,请优先考虑 ModernBERT。

  • 76. OpenRouter

    OpenRouter 是一个统一的 API,可以用于访问多个大型语言模型(LLM)。它为 主流 LLM 提供商 提供了单一的集成点,简化了实验过程,降低了供应商锁定的风险,并通过将请求路由到最合适的模型来优化成本。像 ClineOpen WebUI 这样的流行工具都使用 OpenRouter 作为它们的端点。在我们的技术雷达讨论中,我们质疑大多数项目是否真的需要在模型之间切换,尤其考虑到 OpenRouter 为了盈利,在这一封装层之上需要增加价格加成。然而,我们也认识到 OpenRouter 提供了多种负载均衡策略,有助于优化成本。其一项特别有用的功能是绕过 API 速率限制。如果您的应用程序超出了单一 LLM 提供商的速率限制,OpenRouter 可以帮助您突破这一限制,实现更高的吞吐量。

  • 77. Redactive

    Redactive 是一个企业级 AI 赋能平台,专为帮助受监管的组织安全地为 AI 应用(例如 AI 助手和协作工具)准备非结构化数据而设计。它可以与像 Confluence 这样的内容平台集成,创建用于 检索增强生成(RAG) 搜索的安全文本索引。通过仅提供实时数据并从源系统强制执行实时用户权限,Redactive 确保 AI 模型访问的是准确且授权的信息,而不会影响安全性。此外,它还为工程团队提供工具,支持他们安全地使用任何大语言模型构建 AI 应用场景。对于正在探索 AI 驱动解决方案的组织,Redactive 提供了一种简化的数据准备和合规方法,在安全与可访问性之间取得平衡,为团队在受控环境中试验 AI 能力提供支持。

  • 78. System Initiative

    我们对 System Initiative 依然感到非常兴奋。这款实验性工具为 DevOps 工作开辟了一条全新的激进方向。我们非常欣赏该工具背后富有创造性的思考,并希望它能够激励更多人突破基础设施即代码(Infrastructure-as-Code)的现状。System Initiative 目前已结束 Beta 阶段,并以 Apache 2.0 许可的形式免费开源。尽管其开发者已经在生产环境中使用该工具来管理基础设施,但它在满足大型企业需求的规模化能力方面仍有改进空间。然而,我们依然认为值得一试,以体验一种与众不同的 DevOps 工具方法。

  • 79. TabPFN

    TabPFN 是一个基于 Transformer 的模型,专为在小规模表格数据集上实现快速而准确的分类而设计。它利用了上下文学习(In-Context Learning, ICL),直接从标注样本中进行预测,无需超参数调整或额外训练。TabPFN 在数百万个合成数据集上预训练,因而能够很好地泛化到不同的数据分布,同时对缺失值和异常值具有较强的处理能力。它的优势包括高效处理异构数据以及对无信息特征的鲁棒性。

    TabPFN 尤其适用于对速度和准确性要求较高的小规模应用场景。然而,它在处理大规模数据集时面临扩展性挑战,并且在回归任务中能力有限。作为一项前沿解决方案,TabPFN 值得评估,尤其是在表格分类任务中,它有潜力超越传统模型,并为 Transformer 在表格数据中的应用开辟新可能性。

  • 80. v0

    v0 是由 Vercel 开发的一款 AI 工具,可根据截图、Figma 设计或简单的提示生成前端代码。它支持包括 ReactVueshadcnTailwind 在内的多种前端框架。除了 AI 生成代码的功能之外,v0 还提供了出色的用户体验,包括预览生成的代码并一步部署到 Vercel 的能力。尽管构建真实世界的应用程序通常需要集成多个功能,不仅仅局限于单个界面,但 v0 为原型设计提供了一个稳固的工具,并可作为开发复杂应用程序的起点初始化代码。

  • 81. Windsurf

    Windsurf 是 Codeium 推出的 AI 编程助手,以其“代理型”(agentic)能力而闻名。类似于 CursorCline,Windsurf 允许开发者通过 AI 聊天驱动实现代码的导航、修改以及命令的执行。它经常发布针对“代理模式”的全新功能和集成。例如,最近它推出了一个浏览器预览功能,使代理能够轻松访问 DOM 元素和浏览器控制台,还提供了一个网页研究功能,让 Windsurf 在适当情况下可以在互联网上查找文档和解决方案。Windsurf 支持多种主流 AI 模型,用户可以启用并引用网页搜索、库文档以及 MCP(Model Context Protocol)集成作为额外的上下文提供者。这些能力让 Windsurf 成为开发者高效工作的强大工具。

  • 82. YOLO

    YOLO (You Only Look Once)系列由 Ultralytics 开发,并持续在推动计算机视觉模型领域的进步。其最新版本 YOLO11 在精度和效率方面比以前的版本有了显著的提升。YOLO11 可以在极少资源消耗下高速运行图像分类任务,这使其适用于边缘设备的实时应用。此外,我们发现使用同样的框架还可以执行姿势估计,物体检测,图像分割以及其他任务,这一特性十分强大。这一重大进展也提醒我们,“传统”的机器学习模型的表现可能比像大语言模型(LLM)等通用 AI 模型更加出色。

Hold ?

No blips

Unable to find something you expected to see?

 

Each edition of the Radar features blips reflecting what we came across during the previous six months. We might have covered what you are looking for on a previous Radar already. We sometimes cull things just because there are too many to talk about. A blip might also be missing because the Radar reflects our experience, it is not based on a comprehensive market analysis.

Download the PDF

 

 

 

English | Español | Português | 中文

Sign up for the Technology Radar newsletter

 

Subscribe now

Visit our archive to read previous volumes