Today's Picks: Three Developer Tools Worth Watching
May 29, 2026 — today's three picks all share a common theme: helping developers avoid pain points.
DBOS: Durable Workflows on Postgres
If you've built backend systems, you know the scenario: a task is halfway through, the server crashes, and recovery means writing a bunch of retry logic. DBOS takes a different approach — since your data is already in Postgres, why not use Postgres as the workflow orchestrator?
Built by a team from MIT and Stanford research (3.9K GitHub stars), DBOS is lightweight to adopt. Install the Python library, connect to your existing Postgres, then annotate functions with @DBOS.workflow() and @DBOS.step() decorators. State is automatically checkpointed to Postgres after each step. On restart after a crash, workflows resume from where they left off.
The tool recently scored 262 points on Hacker News, with commenters saying "finally, no more setting up Temporal." It has native support for AI agent scenarios, integrating with OpenAI Agents SDK and LlamaIndex. Worth trying if your project already uses Postgres.
Multiplayer: Connect AI Coding Agents to Production
More developers are using AI coding assistants like Claude Code and Cursor, but there's an unsolved problem: AI-generated PRs are hit-or-miss. The reason is simple — AI hasn't seen your actual production data, so it's guessing based on logs and your description of symptoms.
Multiplayer connects AI coding agents directly to your production environment. It captures relevant data around the time window when a bug occurred, then feeds that context to the AI assistant for generating fixes. It's not full-volume telemetry — just the narrow slice of data relevant to the problem.
The tool has an open-source version (launching May 2026) and a hosted plan at $12/user/month. Existing customers include IKEA and Walmart. Installation is straightforward: npm install -g @multiplayer-app/cli && multiplayer.
Coalton: Static Typing for Common Lisp
Common Lisp is a wonderfully free-form language, but that freedom means type safety is basically on the honor system. Coalton addresses this by adding a static type system on top of Common Lisp — type classes, algebraic data types, type inference, the works. The ideas come from Haskell and OCaml.
Unlike most new languages, Coalton doesn't need a new runtime. It compiles to Common Lisp and runs on SBCL. You can mix Lisp and Coalton in the same file, with type checking at compile time. If types don't match, the compiler catches it before anything runs.
The project has been in development since 2018, with 1.7K GitHub stars. Notably, it's already in production use in defense and quantum computing. If you're a Lisp user who wants type safety without switching languages, Coalton is worth a look.