Dash-iOS VS caniuse

Hi HN,

I am Jiayuan, and I'm here to introduce a tool we've been building over the past few months: Devv (https://devv.ai). In simple terms, it is an AI-powered search engine specifically designed for developers.

Now, you might ask, with so many AI search engines already available—Perplexity, You.com, Phind, and several open-source projects—why do we need another one?

We all know that Generative Search Engines are built on RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)[1] combined with Large Language Models (LLMs). Most of the products mentioned above use indexes from general search engines (like Google/Bing APIs), but we've taken a different approach.

We've created a vertical search index focused on the development domain, which includes:

- Documents: These are essentially the single source of truth for programming languages or libraries; I believe many of you are users of Dash (https://kapeli.com/dash) or devdocs (https://devdocs.io/).

- Code: While not natural language, code contains rich contextual information. If you have a question related to the Django framework, nothing is more convincing than code snippets from Django's repository.

- Web Search: We still use data from search engines because these results contain additional contextual information.

Our reasons for doing this include:

- The quality of the index is crucial to the RAG system; its effectiveness determines the output quality of the entire system.

- We focus more on the Index (RAG) rather than LLMs because LLMs evolve rapidly; even models performing well today may be superseded by better ones in a few months, and fine-tuning an LLM now has relatively low costs.

- All players are currently exploring what kind of LLM product works best; we hope to contribute some different insights ourselves (and plan to open source parts of our underlying infrastructure in return for contributions back into open source communities).

Some brief product features:

- Three modes: - Fast mode: Offers quick answers within seconds. - Agent mode: For complex queries where Devv Agent infers your question before selecting appropriate solutions. - GitHub mode(currently in beta): Links directly with your own GitHub repositories allowing inquiries about specific codebases.

- Clean & intuitive UI/UX design.

- Currently only available as web version but Chrome extension & VSCode plugin planned soon!

Technical details regarding how we build our Index:

- Documents section involves crawling most documentation sources using scripts inspired by devdocs project’s crawler logic then slicing them up according function/symbol dimensions before embedding into vector databases;

- Codes require special treatment beyond just embeddings alone hence why custom parsers were developed per language type extracting logical structures within repos such as architectural layouts calling relationships between functions definitions etc., semantically processed via LMM;

- Web searches combine both selfmade indices targeting developer niches alongside traditional API based methods. We crawled relevant sites including blogs forums tech news outlets etc..

For the Agent Mode, we have actually developed a multi-agent framework. It first categorizes the user's query and then selects different agents based on these categories to address the issues. These various agents employ different models and solution steps.

Future Plans:

- Build a more comprehensive index that includes internal context (The Devv for Teams version will support indexing team repositories, documents, issue trackers for Q&A)

- Fully localized: All of the above technologies can be executed locally, ensuring privacy and security through complete localization.

Devv is still in its very early stages and can be used without logging in. We welcome everyone to experience it and provide feedback on any issues; we will continue to iterate on it.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.11401

Not a complete answer, but I hope Markdown is or becomes the standard for offline docs and text for local/offline consumption. I only ever write in markdown anyway (usually with http://obsidian.md).

The closest thing I know of for a service like RSS to download documents is [Dash for macOS - API Documentation Browser, Snippet Manager - Kapeli](https://kapeli.com/dash).

There are so many great sources of information out there and tools to improve the developer experience of documentation. Dash can make some of these online resources local for instant search and access on-the-go, if you prefer.

For iOS, there used to be dash, but I'm learning now that was discontinued.

If developer accounts count, then you can run unsigned / self signed code on iOS as well. That's how Dash for iOS was distributed for some time when it was banned from the App store: https://github.com/Kapeli/Dash-iOS

Can I X, is a question about the readiness/compliance of a certain thing at time = now. Can I use CSS version X was the iconic early meme.

https://caniuse.com/?search=css3

For a generalized example, if you wanted to know if the basketball courts were ready for you to “ball it up” in a certain city, it’d be caniball.com

If you want to know if you can use a certain frontend technology, the idea is like: canwefigma?

It’s a glorified feature matrix, and usually a project of a passionate community. I approve, even if some of the memes are a bit dank.

https://caniuse.com/ is a popular tool to check what web features are working across different browsers - "can you use this and assume that it will work for others".

The article uses custom css @properties which are awesome and have 88% browser support [1].

One thing to watch out for is differences in how browsers handle setting the fallback initial-value. Chrome will use initial-value if CSS variable is undefined OR set to an invalid value. Firefox will only use initial-value if the variable is undefined. For most projects, this won't be an issue, but for a recent project, I ended up needing to use javascript to set default values in Firefox to iron out the inconsistency between browser implementations.

[1] https://caniuse.com/?search=%40property

Safari is the only browser that doesn't support extending HTML element

https://caniuse.com/?search=Custom%20Elements

You forgot to mention (Web)Workers. This is explicit creation, management, and communication with additional threads within JavaScript. What's more, they've been around in JavaScript longer than the V8 engine has even existed!

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Workers...

https://caniuse.com/?search=webworkers

Do you happen to know where can I check out the cutoff version for each browser? https://caniuse.com/?search=wasm doesn't have it (or other things like WasmGC for that matter)

(https://caniuse.com/) A handy tool for checking the browser compatibility of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript features. Can I Use provides up-to-date support tables for various web technologies across different browsers.

Caniuse