Technology insight for the enterprise
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Building an AI agent that looks impressive in a demo is now a weekend project. Building one that an enterprise will actually let touch its CRM, its data warehouse, and its customers is a different discipline entirely — and almost none of the challenges associated with shipping an agent live in the model. The challenge is infrastructure around the model, including who it is allowed to be, what it…
Microsoft’s open sourcing of .NET not only has sped up the development of the platform, but also has allowed new languages and features to be built on top of the .NET runtime and compilers. At the same time, the extensibility features of Visual Studio Code make it easy for developers to provide the tooling we need to use those new platform capabilities. One of the more interesting new projects to…
I run 49 scheduled AI agents on one laptop. Another 24 sit beside them, deliberately switched off. That distinction matters more than it sounds. After eighteen months, I have stopped being surprised by model errors. Models misunderstand requests and occasionally produce confident nonsense. I expect that. I test for it. What still catches me is how rarely those errors cause an outage. No serious…
AI coding tools are increasingly becoming the place where developers write and modify software. SpaceX-owned Cursor now wants to bring code hosting into that same environment, potentially challenging GitHub’s position as the center of the software development lifecycle (SDLC). The company, earlier this week, launched Origin , an early-beta code-hosting platform that brings repositories, pull…
While some organizations are still getting started with their AI strategies, others are in pilot purgatory , with few experiments or proofs of concept (POCs) reaching production. Only 25% of organizations have moved 40% or more of their AI experiments into production, according to The State of AI in the Enterprise . We discussed delivering AI proofs of concept that matter at a recent Coffee With…
Regular readers will probably have figured out that I’m generally an optimist. I think things are always getting better, and the future of the human race looks pretty good. Technology has taken us from grinding poverty to a pretty good life here on Planet Earth. I also believe that life has gotten immensely better for software developers just in the last year. We’ve seen AI agents suddenly and…
Diffusion models are becoming sophisticated enough that they can reproduce an image even when they don’t have access to the original. In a series of ‘what if’ scenarios, researchers associated with MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) swapped out different training datasets to test the impact on image outputs when original image data was completely removed. It turns…
Open-weight AI models are a big deal, as Nvidia and more than 200 other companies and organizations attested in their “Open Weights and American AI Leadership” letter in July. The question is who will pay for them. Why are they a big deal? Well, former Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst will tell you that “open weights can play the same catalytic role [as open source]” to drive innovation in AI. This…
DuckDB, the analytics database with high-end features in a single easily deployed binary, is due to release a major update, version 2.0, this fall. In a blog post on the DuckDB site , the project’s maintainers outlined several key features that motivated a major version bump. The single biggest is a client/server mode, allowing DuckDB to function both as a compact, in-process database for a single…
There is an important distinction between using AI to generate UI code during development and letting AI generate executable UI at run time. If a developer uses ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or another AI coding assistant to generate a component, template, stylesheet, test, or even an entire feature, that can be a productive workflow. The generated code still enters the normal software…
The public cloud market is experiencing an extraordinary financial moment, with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud all benefiting from the explosive demand for AI infrastructure and services. AWS continues to turn its infrastructure dominance into new AI-driven revenue streams, including managed AI platforms, custom chips, and large-scale compute services. Microsoft has made…
GitHub has restored services after a nearly eight-hour outage disrupted several of its core developer tools, including Actions, pull requests, APIs, Git operations, Webhooks, and Copilot, impacting software development workflows across its platform. “This incident has been resolved. Thank you for your patience and understanding as we addressed this issue,” the company wrote on its status page .…
Promoting the use of coding agents with its cloud-based document database, MongoDB has unveiled the MongoDB Atlas Managed MCP Server. Fully hosted and managed, the MongoDB Atlas Managed MCP Server connects coding agents to MongoDB Atlas without requiring customers to run additional infrastructure. Developers can easily add MongoDB Atlas to Claude Code, Codex, Grok Build, and Devin, said MongoDB,…
Chinese AI developer Zhipu has launched GLM-5.3, a new coding-focused AI model that the company says has developed unexpectedly strong cybersecurity capabilities, putting it close to global leading models in vulnerability discovery while remaining behind them on deeper exploitation tasks. Zhipu’s own testing places GLM-5.3 slightly ahead of Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol on…
The Bonsai 27B model from PrismML is the latest of many to squeeze a large number of parameters (27 billion) into a footprint compact enough to fit on a smartphone. The original model weighed in at 54 GB. However, PrismML claims its 1-bit quantized version — a mere 3.9 GB — can deliver “multi-step reasoning, structured tool calls, vision tasks, and computer-use agentic loops that stay coherent…
Senior data engineers are trained to be skeptical of proprietary platforms. When I entered a Palantir Foundry training bootcamp, I expected to find a slow, expensive alternative to the mature tools I know on AWS and Azure. What I found instead was a platform built for a radically different user, one who cannot write SQL but needs answers now. I want to write about what I actually observed…
Enterprise teams are moving from chat-based assistants to systems that can take actions. I see the shift in how people describe the work. They ask for an assistant that can write code, file tickets, update CRM records, run a compliance checklist, generate a pull request, and follow through on the next step. That shape of work requires an agentic system. I define an agentic system as software that…
Google has introduced Credentio, an open source C++ library for C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authority) Content Credentials. Announced August 13 and available at the mediaprovenance repository, Credentio provides an API designed to run locally within developer applications. This removes the need to send media files to cloud servers for validation, which incurs privacy, latency,…
As data centers evolve into AI factories, compute has shifted from a cost center to a revenue driver. “Compute is revenue,” said Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Without compute, there is no way to generate tokens. Without tokens, there’s no way to generate revenue. So, in this new world of AI, compute equals revenue.” This reframe changes an organizations’ calculus. If compute is…
Model routing has emerged as a way to keep AI inferencing costs down by examining prompts and directing them to the most appropriate model — for example, the cheapest one able to respond effectively. This means that requests can be handled more efficiently, giving more accurate results and lower runtime costs, a concern in an era of rising AI expenditure . Nvidia sees the potential for model…
Oracle has released a security tool intended to provide organizations with a centralized view of security risk across their database environments. Oracle Database Security Central will be available free of charge until the end of February 2027. It arrives at a critical time for Oracle customers, with attackers targeting security flaws to exploit the company’s database products . Oracle is also…
Google has launched Gemini 3.7 Flash, with updates focused on coding, automation, and agent workflows, alongside lower pricing for production deployments. The release, just three weeks after Gemini 3.6 Flash, reflects what the company described as rapid iteration driven by developer feedback. Google positioned the model as its “most intelligent workhorse model yet for coding and agents,” aimed at…
Enterprises are taking a serious look at neoclouds , the specialized cloud providers built primarily around AI infrastructure, especially GPUs , high-speed networking, and large-scale compute clusters for model training and inference. Unlike traditional hyperscalers that provide broad platforms for almost every kind of enterprise workload, neoclouds tend to focus more narrowly on accelerated…
One of AI vendor DeepSeek’s biggest selling points has been its ultra-low price point, but that party’s about to end. The Chinese model provider is raising API pricing for its V4 model family by notable margins, in some cases by more than 1,100%. The increases may not be that dramatic for all, though; the company is encouraging “more flexible workload scheduling,” with peak rates and half-price…
The MSVC Build Tools Preview is updated regularly with the latest features and fixes from the MSVC (Microsoft C++) development team. The MSVC team’s updates for August 2026, targeting the Visual Studio v14.52 release, bring numerous improvements to the C++ front end, modules, code generation, debugging, static analysis, the linker and assembler, and more. The updates were announced in an August 13…
Microsoft has released Visual Studio Code 1.133, an update to its code editor that brings more flexibility to Anthropic Claude sessions. The update also allows users to open the Agents window without signing in to GitHub. VS Code 1.133 was released August 12 . It can be downloaded for Windows, Linux, and Mac from code.visualstudio.com . With VS Code 1.133, users now can mix Anthropic and Copilot…
Databricks is acquiring Electric, a startup that brings WebAssembly-based Postgres databases into application environments, for an undisclosed sum, in an effort to provide developers a way to run data closer to AI agents as they build increasingly autonomous applications. While traditional applications typically rely on a centralized database to handle application data, agentic applications can…
It’s an idle Tuesday afternoon. You’re in hour three of change management calls to get a CostCenter tag update approved for a production change. Only finops reporting is affected. The change itself will take two minutes of Terraform execution. Last week, you had a DROP TABLE action that destroyed 10TB of obsolete tracking data. It was the same hour of doc writing and three hours of change…
It’s an idle Tuesday afternoon. You’re in hour three of change management calls to get a CostCenter tag update approved for a production change. Only finops reporting is affected. The change itself will take two minutes of Terraform execution. Last week, you had a DROP TABLE action that destroyed 10TB of obsolete tracking data. It was the same hour of doc writing and three hours of change…
A growing sentiment in tech is that large AI model providers will eventually replace traditional software vendors. The argument makes some sense. If a model can write code, answer questions, and automate workflows, then over time it should be able to take on the functionality of thousands of existing applications. Why maintain a fragmented stack of software tools and solutions when a single…
A few years ago, I helped move an application off sticky sessions so we could scale behind an ordinary round-robin load-balancer. On paper it was an infrastructure change. Every service was supposed to be stateless, so removing session affinity should have changed nothing. Nothing crashed. CPU looked normal. Every health check stayed green. But users started reporting workflows that would randomly…
Vibe-coding website company Lovable has raised $400 million in Series C funding at a $13.3 billion valuation. The company also recently announced a partnership with AI infrastructure provider Cerebras to accelerate AI inference on its platform. Lovable is a vibe-coding website where users can create full-stack web applications without coding expertise by describing what they want in plain English.…
Microsoft has announced the seventh preview release of the .NET 11 open source developer platform, with improvements ranging from tiered compilation for async methods and a milestone in bringing CoreCLR to WebAssembly . Developers can download Preview 7 from dotnet.microsoft.com . Production availability for .NET 11 is expected in November. Unveiled August 11 , .NET 11 Preview 7 includes…
CodeRabbit is expanding its AI-powered Code Review platform into what it calls “Agentic Change Management” by adding new capabilities targeted at helping developers navigate the growing volume and complexity of code changes generated by vibe coding agents. These new capabilities include Triage, Change Stack, and a Security Agent. While Triage is designed to prioritize incoming pull requests (PRs)…
I think we all understand what a huge step it was to build the first compiler. Being able to write code that humans can read and understand and turn that into something that a computer can execute was a foundational step in computer science. It enabled the explosion of software that is, as Marc Andreessen said, “eating the world.” The next step was an interpreter for languages like the JVM’s…
I wonder these days. How did we ever write software without AI? I mean, I know we did. It was possible. But with AI it’s like wearing roller skates and a rocket pack. Naturally, we want to encourage developers to embrace this wondrous power. But just as naturally, our industry has found a way to convolute the whole thing. Instead of a sensible game plan, we have a blanket metric that, by embracing…
Business intelligence (BI) platform provider Metabase has disclosed a zero-day SQL Injection vulnerability, warning that customers’ sensitive credentials, tokens, API keys, and other data may have been exposed. The Metabase vulnerability revealed on August 6, designated CVE-2026-72898 , is identified as critical, with a severity score of 10, the highest possible rating. It is present in versions…
JetBrains has released a minor update to IntelliJ IDEA 2026.2, the latest edition of its IDE for Java and Kotlin . The update fixes several bugs impacting Markdown shell scripts, undo actions, terminal sessions, Java code formatting, and more. IntelliJ IDEA 2026.2.1 was announced August 10 . The most notable updates include the following: Markdown shell scripts now execute in the correct order.…
Java Development Kit (JDK) 28 , a non-LTS (Long-Term Support) or “feature release” of standard Java due in March 2027, continues to take shape. Features listed for JDK 28 now include a simple JSON API, which joins a preview of value objects, switching the default mode of the Shenandoah garbage collector to generational mode, and a preview of strict field initialization in the Java Virtual Machine…
