Dev tools in 2026


2026-05-02

If you're building any kind of dev tool, stop investing in UIs, CLIs, and MCP. Instead, invest in APIs/SDKs and documentation, which make your tool more useful for LLMs.

LLMs are becoming extremely adept at using native low-level tools so it doesn't make sense to build wrappers around these that aren't in the training data.

My personal opinion is that documentation is much more useful when a human writes it than an LLM. The LLMs that write documentation are usually not opinionated enough, do not understand which user flows to highlight, and make factual errors.

Documentation is especially helpful in describing how to perform specific flows.