May 2024 Recap

Hey Devs,

You’ve heard about Custom Instructions, but what about real-time context from your entire workflow? Recently, there have been several announcements about AI copilots designed to capture everything on your screen to help you remember all you’ve encountered. While this promises enhanced productivity, it also raises significant security and privacy concerns.

At Pieces, we’ve been pioneering this concept with our security and privacy-focused Live Context feature, powered by the Workstream Pattern Engine, which we released to beta users about two months ago.

Our approach ensures that all your data is filtered, processed, and stored completely on-device, maintaining the highest security standards. Join us for an AMA live stream on June 18 to learn more about how real-time context is revolutionizing developer workflows, why AI should only remember the right things, and the security implications that users should care about.

TL;DR: What's New This Month?

• Coding in Context: The Pieces Podcast: We’re live in less than one hour! Join the Pieces team by listening into our inaugural podcast episode scoped around a typical week in our Cincinnati, Ohio office. We’re discussing what it’s like to work at the forefront of AI and developer tools, and the culture of our fast-paced startup!

• Pieces Copilot+ now with Live Context: Our biggest feature release yet is now available to all users! Update your Pieces desktop application to the latest version to get started.

  Live Context, powered by our Workstream Pattern Engine, provides real-time, on-device contextual assistance by capturing and resurfacing workflow data to enhance developer productivity while ensuring top-tier security and privacy. Live Context enables you to ground your Pieces Copilot Chats with rich context from throughout your recent work-in-progress journey, helping you to pick up where you left off and move faster than ever.

• Support for GPT-4o: Last month OpenAI launched GPT-4o, and its speed and accuracy set the developer world abuzz. Within just a couple days, we began supporting this new model within Pieces, for free! Power your Pieces Copilot Chats with GPT-4o today and let us know what you think–plus stay tuned for several new cloud and local models, including LLama3, Gemini 1.5 and more.

• Documentation Improvements: We worked extensively on improving our documentation to make it more accessible, including a restructure of the navigation. In the coming weeks we’ll be shifting towards a product-first user experience, building our documentation primarily around our desktop app and plugins instead of specific features, as we’ll soon reach feature parity across all integrations. In the meantime, take a look at our new technical glossary for help on building with our SDKs 📝

• AI in Business: Our CEO and Technical Co-Founder, Tsavo Knott, was featured on the AI in Business podcast with Emerj CEO Daniel Faggella, discussing the transformative role of generative AI on software development. Listen in or read the article to learn about the significant impact of AI on developer jobs, the limitations of modern GenAI tools, and how larger context windows are enabling massive productivity boosts for developers.

• We’re Growing Fast: Give a warm welcome to Jim Bennett, our first Head of Developer Advocacy! Jim is a seasoned engineer and developer advocate with experience at Microsoft and liblab, plus he’s British so he sounds way smarter than he actually is 😉 He’ll be learning Pieces in public through a weekly live stream with the help of some of our amazing social partners–tune into the first one at 1pm EST today (June 6th)!

Power Tips + Tutorials

Take a look at live demos and magic moments of our team using Live Context in the Pieces Copilot+, and contact us to share your own use-cases!

Live Demo:

Magic Moments:

Blog Posts:

User Stories:

Andrew Quintana discusses the challenges he’s faced while working on a software engineering Masters degree, coming from a hardware and robotics background, and the ways he’s implemented Pieces into his everyday workflow to accelerate his pace of learning.

Open Source Updates

• We updated our open source meetup schedule–tune in monthly on the first Saturday of each month on YouTube, LinkedIn, or Twitch (instead of Discord). Recordings will be available on Youtube afterwards in case you miss it! Here’s our last meetup on Live Context, GPT-4o, and live demos for community-driven projects!

• If you are interested in being part of our regular meetups and showcasing something you’ve built with Pieces SDKs, please join us on Discord and sync up with our team! We’re always looking for ways to support our community.

• We launched a Sublime plugin! The plugin is open-sourced, so we would love for you to test it out, provide feedback, and help contribute! Follow the steps in the Readme to test–and keep us posted 😊

Trivia Time!!