Newsletter #62 – Podcast Justin Rodermond – CTO at Jump, ex Skillshare, AI Agents in JavaScript, books on AI Engineering and more

DanielFebruary 7, 2025March 20, 2025

It’s Daniel, the author of the  LangChain for JavaScript Developers book and the guy who runs the js-craft.io website.

Welcome to the first JS Craft newsletter of this year!

Let's see the main links and topics of this edition:

👨‍💻 During the previous week, I delivered the first public workshop on AI Agents, LangChain and LangGraph. Was a ton of fun! Special thanks to Michael, Upendra, Lars, Aton, Santosh, Raen, and Claude for making this happen.

🎙 I've published a new podcast with Justin Rodermond, CTO at Jump Revenue and former Senior Director of Engineering at Skillshare. We talked about managing developer teams, career advice, and many other cool stuff. You can watch it here.

🎙 Speaking about the workshop, the next session will be in March. You can sign up here with the 30% early booking discount.

🦜 The team at LangChain is organizing a full in-person conference on AI Agents in San Francisco on 13-14 May 2025. Details here.

🙂 IMO it started to become clear that in a world of ever-changing algorithms & platform risks, focus on stable, direct 1:1 connections. Build one connection at a time. Help & interact with real people. Use email and video. It's more stable to know 2-300 folks directly VS having thousands of followers on social media.

🚀 2025 will be the year of AI Agents. It's still not easy, and they're vertical, specific, controllable agents but Replit, Uber, LinkedIn, Elastic, and Appfolio have shared their stories of using AI Agents in production. All made with LangGraph! Check out this article from the LangChain team.

💬 LLMs are like databases. Sometimes you need a super-fast, easy-to-set-up, low-cost solution like SQLite. Other times, you need a behemoth like Oracle. It all depends on the use case. Bigger isn't always better. High chance that smaller, local models will be the next big thing.

🕵️‍♂️ Lance Martin a core engineer in the LangChain team delivered a fantastic workshop on AI Agents at the AI Engineer World’s Fair 2024. Not sure how I missed it, but you can check it out here, a lot of valuable information.

📙 I am reading the AI Engineering Book by Chip Huyen. It's by far one of the best resources I've encountered in this field. I think it has a chance to become, for AI engineering, what the Clean Code book is for classical programming.

📉 Gergely Orosz who runs the Pragmatic Engineer newsletter wrote a great piece great read on the impact of LMMs on StackOverflow. This graph says it all. We are at the end of an era. I am still wondering how the next AI models will get their training information, given the fact that the human-made information is diminishing.

🔊 If you are a Mac user, try the Mac Whisper application. It completely changed the way I type. Actually, I don't type anymore, but I am speaking to the computer. The movie Her is already here.

😅 As a fun fact, one tech recruiter asked me for a minimum of 5 years of experience with LangChain. I pointed out that LangChain was created only 2 years ago. He did not believe me; said he already had other candidates with 4+ years of doing LangChain. Still wonder why companies pay a fee equal to 15% - 25% of dev's annual salary for these services? Where is the added value?

📗 While searching through some older stuff at my parents' place I discovered the book I used to learn how to code. It was a book about making games in BASIC. Games and books are great!

💵 I think that RAG will be a huge market. Why? Well, 95% of the world's data is "private" and therefore unavailable for training public foundation models. However, we can "feed" this private data to LLMs via RAG. Each organization will likely have its own LLM-RAG app. And speaking of this, you may want to check out this talk on knowledge graphs.

🖥 I don't think AI will replace developers, but there are some real chances that the future of programming will look like this. Maybe each time you will run the above code you will get something different :))

❤️ Here's some quick health stuff: tips for fixing "nerd neck" and different ways to increase your VO2 max.

😊 This will make you smile!

And that’s a wrap for this edition of the JS-Craft newsletter! Be kind, keep coding, and keep learning!