A Song of Types and Agents

Talk transcript

1. 0:02

   Hello, and thank you for being here. I'm Roberto, and today I'm going to tell you this song of types and agents. Uh, basically a song that speaks about languages that fight each other to conquer what's the throne in the AI realm, and how I think that TypeScript might actually be winning this war.

2. 0:28

   But let's start from the beginning. A few years ago, whenever someone was building, uh, in AI, they were certainly using Python. Like, there was no doubt. All the other languages were bowing to Python because, um, because of its, uh, dominion, uh, over the AI world.

3. 0:51

   And then when in twenty twenty-two ChatGPT was released, everybody started wondering and starting understanding that AI was becoming something more, was going outside of the bubble that it lived for years and started to becoming something more ambitious.

4. 1:14

   And together with it, Python, which was the standard language for AI, became more ambitious as well.

5. 1:22

   And that's how in twenty twenty-four, uh, GitHub actually claim- climbed the ladder and became the most popular language on GitHub. So, you know, everybody was happy. Python finally reached the top.

6. 1:40

   But little did they know that there was another contender for the throne, another contender that was rising to challenge the claim that Python had on the throne. And this contender, as you may have guessed by now, was indeed TypeScript.

7. 2:01

   But before talking about this, let me present myself. My name is, uh, Roberto. I'm the CTO and co-founder of Ratel, a context layer for AI agents, and I'm also the EU ambassador for AI Socratic, a global community of AI builders meeting once per month to discuss the latest news in AI.

8. 2:23

   I'm also a longtime JavaScript then turned TypeScript, uh, developer, and that's basically why I am, um, talking about TypeScript today. So let's begin.

9. 2:38

   As we said, AI started moving up to the stack. It was moving from the infrastructure layer of these, um, models, machine learning, and all related ecosystem towards the application layer.

10. 2:54

    This means that AI, uh, stopped being something that you train, and it started being something that you ship inside your application. Applications started featuring AI, started having features powered by AI, which basically means that we started having applications that think.

11. 3:19

    And the application layer was not Python's. The application layer has been TypeScript's for pretty long time now.

12. 3:32

    Don't get me wrong, like, I still think that Python has its own, um, application. Like, I still think that the brain of the, of the agent and all the, of all the AI world is actually still owned by Python.

13. 3:50

    All the training, the research, the GPU serving is all Python's. Uh, has been Python's all along and it's going to be Python's for a long time yet. And, um, what's changing is actually the application layer.

14. 4:05

    Like, few years ago, if you wanted to build something with AI built in the application, you had to use Python. But today, that's not the case anymore, and that's all, uh, the shift is about.

15. 4:20

    TypeScript doesn't just own, you know, the UI or the back end. It started owning also the agentic layer of our application.

16. 4:31

    And that's why in August twenty twenty-five, types three-- TypeScript actually passed Python as the most used language on GitHub. And the funny thing is that the reason that the GitHub report gave was the same.

17. 4:48

    Like in twenty twenty-four, it said AI leads Python to top language, while in twenty twenty-five it said AI leads TypeScript as the first language. And in both cases, as you can see, the global developers, the number of global developers were surging.

18. 5:10

    In twenty twenty, twenty twenty-five, we even have one new developer joining GitHub every second.

19. 5:18

    So what actually changed in this year? Like, yeah, we were flooded from, like, new developers. In twenty twenty-four, these newcomers were reaching for Python or even maybe existing developers were reaching for Python, and in twenty twenty-five they reached for TypeScript instead.

20. 5:42

    What changed between twenty twenty-four and twenty twenty-five was actually coding agents. The coding agents grew up. Like we saw established, um... We saw the players establishing themselves like Lavapo, Glo- CloudCode, Cursor, Codex.

21. 6:00

    They became the default way to build applications. And the default way to, uh, to which these coding agents actually build the applications was TypeScript. And, you know,

22. 6:17

    since every new app, pretty much every new app is an agent today because they ship this AI and agentic capabilities, they are hungry to embed AI inside themselves, the demand to have more AI integrations, more and more AI integrations doesn't fall onto Python, it

23. 6:41

    falls on TypeScript. And pretty much all the tools that we use to build AI today already run on TypeScript. We even saw an AI lab acquiring a JavaScript runtime, like last December, Anthropic acquired Bun.

24. 7:05

    But still, you know, okay, everybody us- is using TypeScript because of the coding agents, and we are having

25. 7:15

    more and more demand to build, uh, a, to embed the AI inside TypeScript application. But does this mean that we should do it? Like, this is a fair question.

26. 7:26

    Like, it's an honest question, and it's a question worth answering.

27. 7:32

    And the answer, in my opinion, can be yes, like for several reasons.

28. 7:38

    The first one is that since TypeScript is the default language for coding agents today, we can expect that they will become better and better in, in TypeScript because we are having more and more application in TypeScript, which are going to field the training of next coding agents.

29. 7:58

    And then we are having, uh, deeper integrations and more native integrations from these coding agents towards TypeScript, and we can expect that the quality of the output in TypeScript is going to be better and better from these coding agents.

30. 8:14

    Since we're building applications and, uh, we want to have like the highest quality of these applications, might make sense to build agents which are the new kind of applications in TypeScript.

31. 8:28

    And also, if you use TypeScript, you're actually tapping into what is probably the richest package manager out there. NPM comes with everything, uh, pretty much everything like authentication, payments, UI, infra.

32. 8:48

    Like it's, uh, the deepest app layer tail that there is. So

33. 8:54

    since, again, AI is coming towards the application layer, we need to integrate with all this right now, and tapping inside NPM is a very convenient way to do that.

34. 9:09

    Also, you have... By building in TypeScript, you can have one single language throughout all your codebase. You can have one single codebase for the whole application because you can use TypeScript for your agent loop, for the tools, for the backend service, for the UI.

35. 9:28

    While if you use Python, you probably have to split, uh, split it at least into two services, which means, you know, one service with FastAPI, Pythantic AI, and whatever.

36. 9:41

    And then another, um, separate React application that you need to sync betwe- between these two with a, uh, with a contract which you have to maintain and synchronize.

37. 9:55

    And speaking of contract, with TypeScript, you can have one single consistent typing across all your ap- all your application. While if you use Python instead, you at some point will stop at a boundary because you will have your agent, maybe your backend, et cetera, with one consistent typing, and then you will have your React

38. 10:20

    application or Vue or whatever with, um, another set of typing at which you need to synchronize between the two.

39. 10:31

    So if you use TypeScript, you can use Zod as a single schema throughout all your application, which is very convenient. You can define the type once. You can use this type in the backend and, uh, in the model, and you can use the same type in your UI.

40. 10:48

    One type checked end-to-end. Also, like it makes sense to build in TypeScript today, uh, also in the AI ecosystem because we are seeing a very surge in, in the AI ecosystem as well.

41. 11:05

    Like take the Versace AI SDK, for example. You can see that in just one year it went from one point six million to fifteen point one million downloads per week, which is between nine and ten X in just one year.

42. 11:22

    So finally, like to put everything together, in my opinion, yes, it makes sense to build AI agents in TypeScript because you have like, um, uh, you can leverage the de facto default language for coding agent.

43. 11:37

    You can have one single language for your whole application and your whole codebase. You can tap into a fast-growing AI ecosystem. You can have consistent typing, uh, across all your application, and you can tap into the richest package manager that there is, NPM.

44. 11:59

    So, um, you might ask, was all this unpredictable? And the answer is actually no. Someone predicted this, uh, many years ago, almost, uh, twenty years ago. Jeff Atwood said any application that can be written in JavaScript will eventually be written in JavaScript.

45. 12:21

    And, you know, as you, as you probably know, in the last few years, we have a corollary of this that any application that could be written in JavaScript will eventually be written in TypeScript.

46. 12:33

    And so basically, we can say that any application, even the agentic ones, will be written in TypeScript.

47. 12:43

    And be mindful that what I showed you today is just the beginning, like we're just getting started. You can project this in a few years, and you can see that on the application layer, the difference between TypeScript and Python is actually going to widen from here.

48. 13:02

    So, um, as I said, the model can still run on pip, but the agents, which is the application layer today, so the agent that call the models will probably ship on npm.

49. 13:20

    So everything on the inference layer, you know, is going to be Python, but everything ver- everything else, probably all TypeScript.

50. 13:31

    Let me leave you with one recommendation then. Um, keep training in Python. As I said, I don't see that one going away, uh, soon. But please consider building the agents and the applications in TypeScript, 'cause if you don't do that now, if you overlook TypeScript, you are probably going to fall behind.

51. 13:56

    That was all on my side today. Um, I thank you all for, uh, your listening, and please, uh, scan the QR code for the slides. Reach out to me if you agree or if, if you disagree, if you have any feedback, and let's get in touch.

52. 14:11

    Thank you. Bye-bye.