lingo.dev VS mastra

If you've read my previous articles on HTML5 elements you didn't know you need or CSS modal windows, you know we like unusual tech at Lingo.dev. These upcoming JavaScript features solve real problems that have annoyed developers for years.

At Lingo.dev, we've been using this a lot deep inside our localization API, and it's dramatically simplified our text processing pipeline. What used to require multiple specialized libraries and server-side processing can now be handled directly in the browser with just a few lines of code.

As you know, we love unusual tech at Lingo.dev. So when in my last essay, David commented he was surprised to not see "dialog" HTML element, it hit me - wait, but there's so many HTML5 elements that we don't even know about!

Wait, you can build modal windows without JavaScript? Yep, that's CSS secretly laughing at JavaScript behind its back. At Lingo.dev, we love diving into weird engineering rabbit holes that make other devs do a double-take.

At lingo.dev, we're always on top of the latest models to ensure our translations are perfect. So when Meta released Llama 4, I immediately dug into what makes it special and how we developers can leverage its power without the infrastructure headaches.

In this post, I'll walk you through how to build an automated CI/CD translation pipeline using Lingo.dev and Knock that will handle localized notifications for your app without requiring any manual translation work from your team. We’ll introduce some tools that can help you scale your application to a global audience, automate translations locally using Lingo.dev's CLI, and finally integrate that CLI into a CI/CD pipeline so that translations are automatically created when developers open a pull request.

Hey! Max here, one of the co-founders - great question!

Technically - it's a compiler plugin: it augments build artifacts, so that extracting text from the app into JSON files for further translation is no longer required.

Since we're solving the problem at compile time, React code remains the same, but the app becomes just one cli command away from being fully translated into other languages!

Here's me speedrunning (~2min?) the localization of a typical next js app from english to spanish: https://github.com/replexica/replexica/blob/main/getting-sta...

Mastra

Love to see more frameworks like this in the Typescript eco-system! How does this compare to Mastra: https://mastra.ai/

We wanted to build a course for new Mastra devs to get started quickly. However, we knew videos would go out of date and be more difficult to maintain.

We decided to launch our "course" as an MCP server. This way your coding agent actually teaches the course content to you and can help you write the code. We think this is a really interactive way to learn.

Using an editor with MCP support (such as Cursor, Windsurf, or VSCode), your code agent will call the appropriate MCP tools which will return context for the agent. This context tries to instruct the agent that it should be teaching you the content, not just doing the work for you.

The course is still pretty experimental and some models work better than others. Code is available in the Mastra Github repo in the mcp-docs-server package (https://github.com/mastra-ai/mastra/tree/main/packages/mcp-d...)

Mastra is an open-source TypeScript agent framework. You can use Mastra to build AI agents that have memory, can execute functions, or chain LLM calls in deterministic workflows. You can also feed them application-specific knowledge using RAG. Mastra also comes with built-in support for running evals and observability, making it very suitable for production use cases.

Mastra is a TypeScript framework for building prototypes and production-ready AI agents. Like Chainlit, Mastra offers a standardized way to connect to MCP servers to access a wide range of tools with stdio or sse-based connections.

Added support in this PR https://github.com/mastra-ai/mastra/pull/1957! Isn't shipped just yet but will be soon