Today's generative AI technologies offer two significant advancements. First, LLMs can serve as a design sounding board, shifting designers' focus from pixel manipulation to ideation. Second, the journey from design to a functional app has been greatly shortened, facilitating rapid prototyping.

Project IDX is an AI-centric, browser-based development environment that was launched as an invite-only service in August. Over 100,000 developers have already tried the service, which is now available in open beta. Google has added an integration with the Google Maps Platform into the IDE and integrations with the Chrome Dev Tools and Lighthouse to help debug applications. It will soon enable deploying apps to Cloud Run, Google Cloud's serverless platform for running front- and back-end services, and integrate with Checks, Google's AI-powered compliance platform.

Microservices are popular and great for scalability and team organization, but can bring problems to smaller organizations. Too many services can be hard to maintain, create excessive interdependencies, and make downsizing difficult in tough economic times.