“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” –W. Gibson

I was on an AI-focused podcast last week talking about how a new software engineer should work differently in this new era of AI. It reminded me of a conversation I had recently with a college grad in their first professional software engineering career. They were asking for advice from a wizened old coder (I was even wearing the suspenders). With the latest in AI coding tools, they were productive for sure, but they didn’t understand all of the code that the AI agent was producing. They were afraid that without being forced to write the code they old-fashioned way for cough 40 years cough, that they weren’t ever really going to understand what they were doing.

A little while ago, I was inspired by Thorsten’s blog post on building an AI Agent using Rust to build an AI Agent using Dart. The combination of a conversation with Gemini and a set of tools allowed us to build an agent that could take some prompts from the user and turn them into not just responses (Ask mode), but actions (Agent mode!). In the spirit of Agentic Apps month for Flutter this month, I wanted to share how to do the same thing in your Flutter app using the most recent release of the Flutter AI Toolkit.

The Python community has a library called pydantic that adds type checking at run-time to a dynamically typed language. The library allows them to be “pedantic” about type validation in Python aka pydantic; get it? : )

To say that there has been a lot of activity in the AI space for developers lately would be an understatement. As we transition from “Ask” mode in our AI-based dev tooling to “Agent” mode, it’s easy to see agents as something magical.

Hello, again, and welcome to another installment of “Flutter + AI = Joy.” In today’s episode, we’re taking a behind-the-scenes look at the design and implementation of the generative AI features in the latest version of DartPad. Before we get started, if you haven’t already read Amanda’s most excellent blog post for an overview of the new functionality, I recommend starting there.

It has been quite an exciting few years since I left Google in 2022. I had been on the Flutter team for 3 years by that point, helping it go from v1.0 to v3.0, from hundreds of thousands of users to millions. It was exciting, but time for a change. And boy did I get some! Over the next 3 years I did the following: