AI Native Dev Newsletter - Week #40
Weekly Newsletter Digest
- News: 4 pieces for AI Native devs + 6 hand-picked news
- Podcast: How Slack AI Agents Accelerate Dev Productivity.
- Landscape: 9 tools in the spotlight!
- DevCon: Early bird tickets available now.
News
The 5 levels of AI agent autonomy: Guy Podjarny maps AI agents on a spectrum from copilots to full autonomy, stressing that progress is gradual. Teams investing early in specs and validation capture the biggest gains.
Replit’s new Plan Mode: safer vibe coding: Replit introduces “plan mode,” shifting AI from direct code edits to structured planning. It curbs risky vibe-coding, adds guardrails, and reframes AI dev tools around safety and control.
Anthropic’s eye-watering $183B valuation: Anthropic’s $13B raise pushes valuation past Boeing. It’s infrastructure now—fueling startups but exposing them to pricing shocks from costly frontier models.
Taming AI agents with specs: what the experts say. At Tessl’s King’s Cross meetup, panelists debated specs as guardrails for AI coding agents. Specs bridge intent and implementation, enabling validation, collaboration, and adaptability.
AI Native Dev Radar 📡
- How Claude Code is built
- Automated software testing, by Andrew Ng
- When to build agent loops and when not to, by Simon Willison
- ChatGPT Developer Mode
- Figma context to your favourite agentic tools
- Building agents with the Claude Agent SDK
Join us at DevCon Fall
Early bird tickets now available
On Nov 18–19, 2025, DevCon lands in Brooklyn, New York! For the first time, our global community of AI-native developers will gather in person, and online, to dive deep into spec-driven development, coding agents, next-gen dev tools, and real AI development lessons from the field.
👉 Get your early bird tickets here.
Landscape
Your Guide to the AI Development Ecosystem
Notable mentions soon showcased on the Landscape:
- ShellGPT, CLI offering shell commands, code snippets, and docs generation.
- TryNia, context augmentation for agents.
- ContextKit, CLI tool + MCP client for creating spec files for agents.
- SpecForge-Agent, an autonomous software engineering agent that forges production-ready code.
- Airweave lets agents search any app.
- Stackbench, benchmarks coding agents on library-specific tasks.
- Figma MCP.
- SpecifyX - toolkit to help you get started with Spec-Driven Development.
- Roma, meta-agent framework to build multi-agent systems.
Discover more AI dev tools on Landscape.
New on podcast
How Slack AI Agents Accelerate Dev Productivity
In this episode of AI Native Dev, Simon Maple sits down with Samuel Messing, VP of Engineering for Search and AI at Slack, to explore how they are tackling one of AI’s toughest challenges: managing enterprise context at scale for 80% of the Fortune 100.