InfoWorld

Visual Studio Code 1.108, the latest version of Microsoft’s popular code editor , introduces support for Agent Skills, a new feature that allows users to teach the GitHub Copilot coding agent new capabilities and provide domain-specific knowledge. VS Code 1.108, also known as the December 2025 release, arrived January 8 . Developers can access it for Windows, Linux, and Mac from code.visualstudio…

Snowflake ( NYSE:SNOW ) has rapidly become a staple for data professionals and has arguably changed how cloud developers, data managers and data scientists interact with data. Its architecture is designed to decouple storage and compute, allowing organizations to scale resources independently to optimize costs and performance. For cloud developers, Snowflake’s platform is built to be scalable and…

Snowflake is planning to acquire AI-based site reliability engineer (SRE) platform provider Observe to strengthen observability capabilities across its offerings and help enterprises with AIOps as they accelerate AI pilots into production. “Longer term, Snowflake is positioning itself as infrastructure for AI at scale. As AI agents generate exponentially more data, vertically integrated data and …

2026 is already popping with new Python goodies: an ultra-fast type checker from the makers of uv, Django 6, and a new way to generate C code with Python for faster-executing apps. Read on for these and other highlights. Top picks for Python readers on InfoWorld Reader picks: The most popular Python stories of 2025 What a year 2025 was. From free-threaded Python to integrations with Rust and Zig,…

Microsoft has open-sourced XAML Studio, a rapid protoyping tool for WinUI developers using XAML. Microsoft made the announcement on January 6 . XAML Studio lets developers prototype user interface ideas before integrating them into an app within the Visual Studio IDE . Developers can prototype UWP-based (Universal Windows Platform) XAML apps. Tools and helpers are provided such as live edit and I…

Databricks is joining the AI software vendors quietly admitting that old-fashioned deterministic methods can perform much better than generative AI’s probabilistic approach in many applications. Its new “Instructed Retriever” architecture combines old-fashioned database queries with the similarity search of RAG ( retrieval-augmented generation ) to offer more relevant responses to users’ prompts.…

Devops used to be a simple process. Take one component of the stack, run some unit tests, check a microservice in isolation, confirm it passed integration tests, and ship it. The problem is, that doesn’t test what actually matters—whether the system as a whole can handle production workloads. This simple approach breaks down fast when AI workloads start generating massive volumes of data that nee…

A former longtime contributor to the development of Rust now is building a Rust-based language of his own, called Rue , which is intended to provide memory safety without garbage collection while being easier to use than Rust and Zig . Claude AI technology is being leveraged for developing Rue. Written entirely in Rust, the language is in its early stage of development, with initial support for t…

Microsoft has acquired AI-based data engineering firm Osmos for an undisclosed sum, as part of its effort to reduce data engineering friction inside Fabric, its unified data and analytics offering, as enterprises continue to push analytics and AI projects into production. Osmos’ technology, which applies agentic AI to turn raw data into analytics and AI-ready assets in OneLake, will help customer…

The advent of Model Context Protocol (MCP) APIs hints at a coming era of agent-driven architecture. In this architecture, the chat interface becomes the front end and creates UI controls on the fly. Welcome to “generative UI.” The new portlet Once upon a time, the portal concept promised to give every user a personalized view. Finally, the promise of a web where the user was also the controller c…

In the early 19th century, the invention of the loom threatened to turn the labor market upside down. Until then, cloth was made by skilled artisans, but the loom enabled more cloth to be made more quickly by less-skilled workers. One could even argue that the Jacquard loom , a loom that allowed for complex weaving patterns via punch cards, was the first computer. This technology had a disruptive…

Human coders may have a temporary reprieve from losing their jobs to AI. According to a new report from LessWrong, it will be between five and six years before we reach full coding automation . This pushes back the online community’s previous predictions that the milestone would be reached much sooner, between January 2027 and September 2028. The extended timeline comes just eight months after Le…

Researchers have developed a tool that they say can make stolen high-value proprietary data used in AI systems useless, a solution that CSOs may have to adopt to protect their sophisticated large language models (LLMs). The technique , created by researchers from universities in China and Singapore, is to inject plausible but false data into what’s known as a knowledge graph (KG) created by an AI…

Ruby 4.0.0 has arrived as the newest release of the interpreted, object-oriented Ruby programming language . The update features a new just-in-time compiler, ZJIT, and an experimental “Ruby Box” capability for in-process separation of classes and modules. Released on December 25, 2025 , Ruby 4.0.0 can be downloaded from ruby-lang,org . Ruby Box is a new feature designed to provide separate spaces…

Security researchers have flagged a high-severity flaw in Open WebUI , a self-hosted enterprise interface for large language models, that allows external model servers connected via its Direct Connections feature to inject malicious code and hijack AI workloads. The issue, tracked as CVE-2025-64496, stems from unsafe handling of server-sent events (SSE), enabling account takeover and, in some cas…