Dev news

Write the May 2026 issue of Norvane Developer News, the newsletter Norvane Labs sends to developers building on the Vantage models, Norvane Forge, and Norvane Relay. Recipients opted in to developer email. Subject: Norvane Dev News: Realtime 2, Forge for browsers. Preview text: Lots of new launches and one date to save. Headline: Realtime 2, Forge for browsers, and a date to save.

The issue opens with the Developer News masthead (assets.illustrations.devNewsMasthead), then an intro in three parts:

• A lot has shipped lately: updates across models, Forge, and the APIs, and developers are already turning them into new products, games, workflows, and tools.
• The thing the team is most excited about: Norvane Summit 2026 is officially on the calendar (https://norvane-email.s3.amazonaws.com/events/summit-2026). Readers can save the date and enter the contest for a chance to win a ticket (https://norvane-email.s3.amazonaws.com/events/summit-2026/contest).
• Two upcoming online Builder Hours for live answers to product questions, as a short list: Vantage Realtime 2 on May 12, 10am PT (https://norvane-email.s3.amazonaws.com/events/build-hours/realtime), and Cadence SDK on May 28, 10am PT (https://norvane-email.s3.amazonaws.com/events/build-hours/agents-sdk).

Four sections follow, in this order, each separated by a hairline, each opening with its icon from assets.icons beside a section heading and a one-line muted subtitle.

Section 1, What's new (assets.icons.whatsNew), subtitle: What shipped, what changed, what to automate next.

• A new wave of voice intelligence. Three new models in the Realtime API help developers build voice agents that feel more natural in conversation and can act live while speech is happening. Model ids are set in monospace:
  • vantage-realtime-2 (https://norvane-email.s3.amazonaws.com/docs/models/vantage-realtime-2): smarter voice agents with stronger instruction following, prompt adherence, and multilingual capabilities.
  • vantage-realtime-translate (https://norvane-email.s3.amazonaws.com/docs/models/vantage-realtime-translate): translate conversations live across 70 input languages and 13 output languages.
  • vantage-realtime-transcribe (https://norvane-email.s3.amazonaws.com/docs/models/vantage-realtime-transcribe): transcribe each word as it is spoken rather than waiting for a sentence to finish. Readers can see it in action (https://norvane-email.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/voice-intelligence) and try it in the playground (https://norvane-email.s3.amazonaws.com/console/audio/realtime).
• Forge can now use your browser directly. The new browser extension (https://norvane-email.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/forge-for-browsers) builds on computer use, so Forge can work inside sites where the reader is signed in, organize task-specific tabs, and hand back results for review. Artwork: assets.illustrations.forgeBrowser.
• Other updates, as a list:
  • Vantage 5 (https://norvane-email.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/vantage-5) is Norvane's most capable model yet, with stronger reasoning, improved tool use, and more reliable long-running execution.
  • Cadence SDK (https://norvane-email.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/agents-sdk) lets agents inspect files, run commands, edit code, and work on long-horizon tasks within controlled environments. It runs on a customizable harness and supports bring-your-own sandbox from Sandline, Crate, Nimbus Cloud, and more.
  • Forge (https://norvane-email.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/forge-for-everything) for (almost) anything: background computer use, browser interaction, and 90+ new plugins (https://norvane-email.s3.amazonaws.com/docs/forge/plugins).
  • Vantage Image 2 (https://norvane-email.s3.amazonaws.com/cookbook/image-models-prompting) lets developers design production-quality images.
• Two favorites from the showcase gallery, presented as a pair of cards with artwork, title, and a one-sentence description:
  • Horology storefront (assets.illustrations.showcaseHorology): a polished storefront demo (https://norvane-email.s3.amazonaws.com/showcase/horology-storefront) that turns a concept into a branded product experience fast with Vantage 5 and image generation.
  • Lantern Crawl (assets.illustrations.showcaseLanternCrawl): a native macOS game (https://norvane-email.s3.amazonaws.com/showcase/lantern-crawl) built with Forge, Vantage 5, and generated visual assets.

Section 2, Build kit (assets.icons.buildKit), subtitle: Guides, blogs, and things worth cloning. Six items, each a bold lead-in followed by one or two sentences with inline links:

• Migrate a legacy codebase with sandbox agents: a code-migration agent should work in a controlled environment, one scoped task at a time: inspect the relevant repo, edit files, run checks, and return a patch. The cookbook shows agents doing real repo work (https://norvane-email.s3.amazonaws.com/cookbook/sandboxed-code-migration), not just chatting about code.
• Unleash your agents in the docs: Norvane's public docs MCP server lets agents search and read official docs from an editor or CLI (https://norvane-email.s3.amazonaws.com/learn/docs-mcp). It plugs into Forge and editor agent workflows to build doc-aware helpers and custom guides.
• Prompt Vantage 5 around outcomes, not steps: the Vantage 5 prompting guide (https://norvane-email.s3.amazonaws.com/docs/guides/prompting-vantage-5) covers defining goals, constraints, and desired outputs. The docs skill (https://norvane-email.s3.amazonaws.com/docs/skills/norvane-docs) applies the recommendations with Forge, and the upgrade guide (https://norvane-email.s3.amazonaws.com/docs/guides/prompt-upgrade) audits prompts, tool calls, and workflow reliability.
• Prompt better in Forge: the Forge prompting guide (https://norvane-email.s3.amazonaws.com/cookbook/forge-prompting-guide) is the read-this-first resource for teams using Forge directly through the API.
• API deployment checklist: for teams moving to production with the Relay API, a guide to the highest-leverage design choices (https://norvane-email.s3.amazonaws.com/docs/guides/deployment-checklist): reasoning effort, tool_search, built-in tools, compaction, prompt caching, background mode, and WebSocket mode (https://norvane-email.s3.amazonaws.com/docs/guides/websocket-mode), which speeds up agentic runs with 20+ tool calls by 20-40%.
• Forge use cases: the Forge use case library (https://norvane-email.s3.amazonaws.com/forge/use-cases) now has 48 defined use cases and counting.

Section 3, Insider scoop (assets.icons.insider), subtitle: Go behind the scenes with Norvane engineers. Three posts, each with a linked title, a one-sentence summary, and a pull quote from the authors:

• Speeding up agentic workflows with WebSockets in the Relay API (https://norvane-email.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/websockets-responses-api). Priya Raman and Tomas Lindqvist on turning model speed gains into visible workflow speed. Quote: "It's been incredible watching the latency bottleneck shift from model inference to infrastructure. We wanted to share those lessons with developers building the next wave of fast, agentic products."
• Cadence: orchestrating Forge at ticket level (https://norvane-email.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/cadence-orchestration). Mira Castellanos, Daniel Achebe, and Ruth Kowalski explain how Cadence turns an issue tracker into a control plane for coding agents, driving a 500% increase in landed pull requests. Quote: "Six months ago we made a pretty wild decision: no human-written code in the repo. That constraint forced us to rethink how engineering teams and agents work together. Cadence came out of realizing that human context was the limiting factor."
• How Norvane delivers low-latency voice AI at scale (https://norvane-email.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/low-latency-voice). Wen Zhao and Callum Reid outline how Norvane rebuilt its WebRTC infrastructure with a split relay and transceiver architecture, without changing the client-side WebRTC experience. Quote: "Building real-time voice infrastructure at scale forces you to care about every millisecond in a very human way. Writing this piece was a chance to share the engineering decisions that made conversations with AI feel less like software and more like natural dialogue."

Section 4, Devs in the wild (assets.icons.community), subtitle: From side projects to professional work.

• Company spotlight: Halden. Scaling the Realtime API to millions of voice sessions, the Halden team shares hard-won engineering lessons from building voice-first experiences (https://norvane-email.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/realtime-halden) into Halden Browser and Halden Desk.
• Developer spotlight: Ines Okafor, with artwork assets.illustrations.spotlightInesOkafor. From driving solar-powered electric cars to open-sourcing AI prototypes, Ines Okafor (https://norvane-email.s3.amazonaws.com/community/spotlight/ines-okafor) shares how she weaves AI into her creative process, product workflow, and everyday life. Quote: "The name of the game is speed. You can build so much software now, but what will you build that you use every day, that you find beautiful and elegant, and that you can bring to users in a way that's sustainable?"

Sign-off: Happy building, The Norvane Team.

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