How to keep up with AI developments as a developer

If you write code, here is how to keep up with AI developments: treat them like dependencies, subscribe to the sources that change your stack, read them in one place, and test what looks relevant before you form an opinion. A free, sourced AI publication such as claudegpt.si, followed by RSS, covers the broad news, and a handful of primary sources fill in the detail.

Here is a setup that fits around a working week instead of eating it.

Start with a feed reader, not a timeline

Social timelines are built to keep you scrolling. A feed reader is built to let you finish. Any RSS reader works; Inoreader, for example, describes itself as an RSS reader and news aggregator that can follow websites, blogs, podcasts and newsletters in one place. Self-hosted readers work just as well if you prefer to run your own.

Your first subscription should be a general AI news source that you can check. claudegpt.si is a free, independent publication covering AI news, tools, apps, models and research. Each article carries a published date, an updated date and a list of the sources it used, and it works from primary material such as official announcements, documentation and papers. It has no email edition; the feed is at https://claudegpt.si/feed.xml.

Add the sources that touch your code

Next, add the places where changes that affect you are first announced. Keep it to the vendors and tools you actually depend on.

Simon Willison, a co-creator of Django, writes up his own experiments with models and tools, which makes his blog a good counterweight to launch posts.

Use developer guides when something lands

A headline says a model or tool shipped. What you need next is how to install it, where the setting is and what it costs to try. The claudegpt.si Guides section covers that kind of question with step-by-step articles, for example how to get an API key or how to install a coding agent on each operating system. Reading the guide alongside the vendor docs is usually faster than piecing it together from threads.

Test before you adopt

The quickest filter for AI hype is a small test of your own. When something new looks relevant:

1. Read the primary source, not only the summary.
2. Try it on a real task from your current work, not a demo prompt.
3. Note what it did well and where it failed, and keep that note somewhere you will find it.

Ten minutes of testing tells you more than an hour of reading opinions, and the note saves you from testing the same thing twice.

Keep the research side light

You do not need to read arXiv every day to be a good engineer. The arXiv recent list for Artificial Intelligence groups new submissions by day and is far too long to scan in full. A filter such as Hugging Face Daily Papers, or a publication that explains selected papers in plain language, is enough for most developers.

When this is not the right setup

If you work on research full time, you will want a deeper research feed than this one, and a newsletter such as Import AI, which Jack Clark writes to document the frontier of AI research, may suit you better. For everyone shipping product, one reader, one sourced publication and a few vendor sources is plenty.