I’m excited to launch our first set of products, which unlock the power of AI agents in professional software development by using Spec-Driven Development. You can install and use the Spec Registry for free right now and request access to the Tessl Framework’s beta as well.
Our official launch post contains a short explanation about what we are launching and why. However, I also wanted to share a deeper perspective on our vision, the problem we’re solving, and how our products help address that. If you want to dive deeper, you’ve come to the right blog post!
If you’ve ever found yourself pleading with an LLM to adhere to a constraint — using all caps, repeating lines n times, using words like “seriously” and “please” and “I will lose my job if you don’t return pure JSON” — then you’re guilty of begging, to borrow a term from our friend John Berryman. Begging is a bit of a smell. It’s a hint that your prompt might not be structured in a way that gives the LLM the best chance of completing the task.
Today is an exciting day at Tessl: we’re announcing $125M in funding, including an April $25M seed round led by boldstart and GV, and a new $100M Series A led by Index with participation from Accel. We’re happy to be well-fueled for the big journey ahead, and humbled by this vote of confidence in our mission and team.
We’re excited to announce the launch of a brand new conference, AI Native Dev Con. We’re kicking off with an inaugural virtual conference on the 21st November, 2024. The conference aims to help you use AI to develop faster and better today, and exploring how AI is reshaping the way we will build, maintain and evolve software tomorrow. We highlight exciting new tools and advancements in AI-powered software development, with a focus on how large language models are reshaping how we build, maintain, and scale complex codebases. Join us to explore the future where AI goes beyond generating code snippets to orchestrating the creation and evolution of entire software systems.
AI-powered products seem to come in different flavors. Some are big and dramatic, talking about reimagining the world and a bold new future. These solutions are exciting - and potentially frightening - but they also feel quite far away. Others are smaller and pragmatic, typically focusing on productivity. They promise to make you twice as fast and take away boring and repetitive tasks, making them compelling to adopt - but more incremental than revolutionary.
So, I recently took Claude 3.5’s new Artifacts feature for a spin, aiming to build real React-based prototypes. As a designer with over a decade of experience, but without much hands-on React knowledge, this was both exciting and daunting. Let’s dive into how it went!
Each time such a technology is introduced, the easiest way to adopt it is to optimize steps within existing processes. Such optimization is easier as it requires less change - a team can take a process they’re already familiar with and make it better with the new tech. Furthermore, such change is local - meaning other teams don’t need to be involved, so the change is easier and faster to perform. Furthermore, it’s done within familiar boundaries - no big changes to org structures, ways of evaluating performance, ROI calculations, fewer approvals required… easy.
Tessl is reimagining software development for the AI era, and helping shape a new software development paradigm we call AI Native Software Development.
