InfoWorld

MariaDB on Wednesday said it was adding four new agent-focused capabilities to Enterprise Platform 2027, the latest version of its enterprise database platform, to help developers retrieve enterprise data faster, maintain agent memory across sessions, and reduce the cost and latency of repeated model queries. These new capabilities include AI Retrieval, AI Plugins, Agent Memory, and Semantic Cach…

Something strange is going on in the job market for software developers. Everyone is worried that their job is going to go away and businesses are going to turn software development over to the machines. Few dispute that agents write good code . I’ve even argued that our days of writing code are pretty much over . Sure, agents are writing the code, but we aren’t quite ready to turn the whole thin…

htmx lets you add rich functionality to web pages without writing JavaScript . But it also lets you integrate JavaScript if you need it, either by adding functions in-line to elements or by writing more complex hooks for events. These behaviors let you take web pages that already use JavaScript, and either migrate to htmx entirely or add htmx only where it’s needed — for instance, in new parts of…

Snowflake is hoping to improve the reliability of AI agents with a new tool called Business Ontology, as part of its Horizon Catalog, meant for data discovery, management, and governance. Horizon Catalog received a boost in June with the launch of Horizon Context , a set of semantic and metadata management capabilities to help enterprises collect, enrich, and organize metadata across their data e…

Ever since Stephen O’Grady’s The New Kingmakers , we’ve all been trying to figure out how to appeal to developers. Now we’re going to have to figure out how to appeal to their agents. AI agents , after all, increasingly write our code and decide which tools, libraries, etc., to use in writing that code. This means that although developers still own the application, it’s often the agents that own …

Most enterprises went into cloud computing with the idea that flexibility was part of the deal. Move faster. Scale on demand. Pay for what you use. Avoid long procurement cycles. Stop buying hardware that sits around waiting for peak demand. That was the promise, and much of it was real. However, many enterprises also made an assumption that turned out to be only partly true: If you need to leave…

I recently moved my own setup from one coding agent to another. It took about 10 minutes and I thought it went well. The first agent had a lot to carry. Today it has a global instruction file, 114 skill folders (most installed, a few written by me), 189 small memory notes spread across 24 projects and 73 scripts that shell out to its command-line tool. To give a second agent the same footing, I c…

Last week I wrote about how coding agents are better developers than humans . I’ll stand by that — the current agents can write code better, faster, longer, and with far less complaining than we humans can. But that doesn’t make humans unnecessary — quite the contrary. Humans still play a vital role in the process of building software. Here are eight reasons we can use to fend off the robots when…

A malicious version of Anthropic’s Claude Code extension distributed through the Cursor marketplace attempted to install a persistent Secure Shell (SSH) backdoor on developers’ machines, potentially giving attackers remote access to systems holding source code, credentials and other sensitive information. “Between about 2:27am PT and 1:35pm PT today, a maliciously modified version of Anthropic’s …

The modern web is a miracle of engineering, but its history is littered with brilliant concepts that flamed out in execution. For every innovation that stuck the landing, there is a promising technology that fell on its face. Each of these failures offers an object lesson for us as software developers. New tech is kind of a compulsion. We love to gaze at the shiny new frameworks on the horizon, b…

Same question, a different answer Earlier this year, in Are AI certifications worth the investment? , I argued that AI certifications ranked among the highest-return investments an IT professional could make. Much of that case still holds. But the ground has shifted since I wrote that piece in February, and a responsible update has to say so plainly. Two of the six flagship credentials I recommen…

Just about every CTO at a growth-stage company that I know is carrying an infrastructure problem they are quietly deciding not to look at. The system works, so the problem stays out of sight right up until something drags it into the open. That “something,” in our particular case, was a large UK-based bank. The new customer arrived with the expectation of five times our usual traffic. For a nasce…

GitHub is expanding Copilot beyond code generation and developer assistance, launching a redesigned Copilot app and a new Projects capability that enables teams to coordinate multiple AI agents, share context from tools and repositories, and manage software development workflows from a single platform. The updates to GitHub Copilot , announced at the company’s annual GitHub Universe conference, c…

A trillion-parameter AI model that its developer says could help attackers carry out real cyberattacks is now free to download, modify and run outside the developer’s control. Mistral AI released the open weights of Mistral Large 4, which it calls “Le Chonk,” on Thursday, weeks after putting the multimodal model into public preview. The Paris-based company said it had monitored cybersecurity-rela…

People have discovered AI agents running on cloud-based platforms, and suddenly, those agents are the answer to every bit of financial and operational friction in their lives. Move money from one bank account to another to chase a better interest rate. Pay bills automatically. Analyze spending patterns. Optimize subscriptions. Question fees. Move funds before a payment clears. Find the cheaper se…