InfoWorld

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 byte…

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 embracin…

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. U…

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…

Anthropic is making Claude Code’s auto mode the default for its paid and enterprise users, allowing the coding agent to execute more actions without requiring developers to approve each one. “Starting August 14, 2026, auto mode becomes the default permission mode for new sessions on Pro, Max, and Team plans,” the company wrote in the coding agent’s documentation , adding that the same change is p…

Many of the recent supply-chain attacks could have been caught earlier if defenders looked closely at the telemetry GitHub already provides, researchers said. At their Black Hat USA 2026 presentation, researchers Yossi Weizman of Microsoft and Mor Weinberger of Echo argued the case, saying, “GitHub can tell you’re being hacked. You’re just not listening.” The duo described an EDR-style detection …

My current model-selection strategy is embarrassingly simple… and wrong: I choose the most capable (expensive) model because I’m worried the cheaper one might get something wrong. That makes me spend too much, of course, which is why I (like you, perhaps?) continue to struggle with one of the most fundamental challenges in AI: How can I know when a cheaper model is sufficient for a task? Or, real…

Back in 2023 and into 2024, as the hyperscalers announced massive data center expansions and plans for gigawatt-scale facilities, I was in boardrooms explaining why these timelines were unrealistic. The response was often a polite dismissal. The vendors were confident. The press was enthusiastic. And I was, well, the guy asking uncomfortable questions about power grids and infrastructure realitie…

MATLAB , a programming and numeric computation environment for engineers and scientists is sinking in popularity, according to the latest edition of the Tiobe index of programming language popularity. In the Tiobe index for August 2026 , published August 8, MATLAB is ranked 25th, having fallen out of the top 20 for the first time in more than 10 years. “Is this just a temporary dip, or is it the …

Python 3.15 is one of the most feature-packed Python releases in many a moon, and the first release candidate has just arrived. Here’s a rundown of the biggest, boldest, and most important innovations, changes, and fixes. Lazy imports A long-asked for feature, lazy imports allow imports to be processed only when they’re actually used by the program. For slow-importing modules that impose a large …

Microsoft is betting that the integration of HorizonDB, the cloud-native PostgreSQL alternative it is developing, with Azure will attract more enterprise AI and agentic workloads to its cloud services. Enterprises may not be willing to take that bet. It’s been nine months since Microsoft unveiled HorizonDB , but the service remains in public preview with no announced general availability date. Wh…

For years, AI progress was measured by scale: more data, larger models, and more compute. That formula produced real breakthroughs, but autonomous mobility was one of the first industries to discover its limits. On the road, AI does not fail quietly. A misread scene, an ambiguous gesture from a pedestrian, or a construction zone that does not match prior examples can create immediate and visible …

I’ve had a version of the same conversation probably 30 times in the past year. A VP of engineering or a senior SRE describes their observability stack — the dashboards they’ve built, the alerting they’ve tuned, the Datadog or Grafana setup they’ve spent months getting right. And then they describe the last major incident. How the alert fired in seconds. How the dashboard showed exactly where the…

It used to be that the value and reputation of coding contest winners was very high. That’s no longer the case. Who cares how fast you can produce code that implements an algorithm or solves a problem? Your competition is no longer other people, at least not by themselves, but AI combined with insightful prompting and good taste. Historically we wrote all our code ourselves and then we tested it …