Identify Your Top Developer Trends

Plushcap's developer trend data can help you decide which conversations your company should credibly join now. A useful trend is not just growing quickly: it also has enough sustained volume to matter, is showing up in current Hacker News submissions, and connects clearly to your product.

Make sure you've connected Claude, ChatGPT, LM Studio, or the LLM of your choice to the Plushcap MCP server.

Start with this prompt

Use this prompt, and replace the {{ my company }} placeholder with the company name you want to create content for:

Use the Plushcap MCP tools to identify the top trending developer topics that will matter to {{ my company }} over the past 16 weeks. Also obtain our recent product launch blog posts from this year. Which of the top developer trends identified should we attach new product features and content to so that they will matter to developers?

Here's the output for this prompt with Plushcap MCP in September 2026 using Linq as an example.

Example Output

Linq trends graph

Across 564 tracked companies and ~163K mentions since mid-May, engineering-blog conversation is dominated by AI/agent infrastructure. The biggest, most-discussed topics right now are MCP (2,330 mentions last week, 88 companies — the single largest topic tracked), AI Agents (1,015 mentions, 116 companies), LLM, Real-time, Secrets Management (just spiked +77% week-over-week), Observability, AI Coding Assistants, and Voice AI. Officially "trending up" this week specifically: MCP, LLM, Secrets Management, AI Coding Assistants, Fine-tuning, Developer Experience, Local AI, WebMCP, Zero Trust, Loop Engineering, and Agent Plugins.

Linq's 2026 launches (28 posts since May)

Grouped by theme:

Channel/protocol depth: iMessage Apps (interactive cards), group-chat support, @mentions, typing indicators, custom backgrounds, polls, message status webhooks, managed load balancing/failover
Commerce: Agent Pay (Apple Pay checkout in-thread), Agentcard integration (agent-initiated purchases), Natural payment rail
Privacy/compliance: Ephemeral messaging (enforced auto-deletion)
Ecosystem integrations: Official Vercel Managed Connector, Vercel AI Chat SDK adapter
Customer stories: Lindy, Poke, Zo Computer, Ollie, Slash, Clera, VentNow, Caddy — all "how we moved our AI agent into iMessage" narratives
Comparison/SEO content: Best iMessage/SMS/texting API roundups vs. Twilio, Vonage, Sendbird, Sendblue, etc.

Which trends to attach features/content to

I cross-referenced each trend against Linq's actual blog tagging (not just topical similarity) to find real gaps — places where Linq's content should be showing up in a trend but isn't: [A nice table with trends and how Linq maps to them. ]

Deprioritize: Kubernetes, Vector Search, RAG, Observability/OpenTelemetry, Platform Engineering, Fine-tuning, Reinforcement Learning — all either declining or outside Linq's actual product surface (data/ML infra, not messaging).

Bottom line: the two clearest moves are (1) an MCP server/integration — Linq is completely absent from the single biggest conversation in developer AI right now — and (2) explicitly product-and-content around secrets/credential management, which is spiking and which Linq has already half-built (via the Vercel Connector) but hasn't claimed as its own story.

Plushcap, by Matt Makai. 2021-2026.