InfoWorld

Java Development Kit (JDK) 26, a planned update to standard Java due March 17, 2026, has reached its second release candidate (RC) stage. The RC is open for critical bug fixes, with the feature set having been frozen in December. The following 10 features are officially targeted to JDK 26: a fourth preview of primitive types in patterns, instanceof , and switch , ahead-of-time object caching , an…

Google has added an agent step to its Opal tool for building AI-powered mini-apps. Powered by the Gemini 3 Flash model, the new agent in Opal enables autonomous workflows that plan, reason, and execute on the user’s behalf, Google said. Introduced February 24 and available to all Opal users, the agent step upgrades Opal workflows from static model calls to agentic intelligence, according to Googl…

A massive Shai-Hulud -style npm supply chain worm is hitting the software ecosystem, burrowing through developer machines, CI pipelines, and AI coding tools. Socket researchers uncovered the active attack campaign and called it SANDWORM_MODE, derived from the “SANDWORM_*” environment variable switches embedded in the malware’s runtime control logic.” At least 19 typosquatted packages were publish…

Anthropic has accused three Chinese AI developers of running large-scale campaigns to illicitly extract capabilities from its Claude model to improve their own systems. The company claims DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax used a distillation technique, where a less capable model is trained on the outputs of a more advanced one. More than 16 million interactions were generated with Claude through ar…

High inference latency and spiraling GPU costs have emerged as the primary bottlenecks for IT leaders deploying agentic AI systems. These workflows often generate thousands of tokens per query, creating a performance gap that current hardware struggles to bridge. Now, researchers from the University of Maryland, Lawrence Livermore National Labs, Columbia University, and TogetherAI say they can tr…

Snowflake has extended support for Cortex Code CLI, its terminal-based AI coding agent, to dbt and Apache Airflow to help data practitioners streamline engineering workflows. “With this extended support, developers unlock secure, context-aware AI assistance within their preferred data engineering systems — empowering teams to work with data wherever it lives, and build, manage, and optimize produ…

Standardizing on a single cloud infrastructure is much easier than pursuing a multicloud strategy . In a single-cloud environment, IT leaders can optimize skill sets, centralize data more easily, secure infrastructure with fewer tools, and gain many other operational benefits. Yet 89% of enterprises report they are pivoting to multicloud adoption. Reasons for choosing to operate across multiple c…

With every passing year, data continues to grow more important and more central to practically every aspect of corporate operations. As the AI race continues full-steam ahead, it will be mission-critical for CIOs and other technical business decision-makers to get things right when it comes to their data infrastructure. Without the right plumbing, even the best, most robust data estate can become…

The tech industry always values innovation, but Microsoft’s latest adoption of new technology may come at an unusually high cost. The company’s aggressive moves to embed its AI assistant, Copilot, into Windows 11 and Microsoft 365 have polarized users and drawn regulatory scrutiny. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is looking at whether Microsoft’s tactics in the AI arms race, and its cloud and …

Microsoft has introduced C++ symbol context and CMake build configuration awareness for GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code . The C++ code understanding improvements were announced on February 19 . The updates to GitHub Copilot in VS Code bring the same C++ intelligence as the Microsoft’s C/C++ and CMake Tools extensions directly into agent mode by surfacing key language and build system capabil…

Today, it is nearly impossible for anyone in a software development role to avoid AI technology. That’s not a bad thing; individuals and teams can realize numerous potential benefits from AI-driven development. One thing is certain: Software developers who haven’t already done so must adapt their skills to meet the demands of this new era. And they should do it quickly. The Stack Overflow 2025 De…

There is a growing belief that AI will dramatically reduce the need for experienced software engineers. It won’t. The demonstrations are compelling. We see AI connected to Figma for design context, Jira for tickets, source control for repository history, and CI/CD pipelines for deployment. A feature request goes in, code comes out, and a pull request appears. The workflow looks increasingly autom…

Here’s a little bit of snark from developer John Crickett on X : Software engineers: Context switching kills productivity. Also software engineers: I’m now managing 19 AI agents and doing 1,800 commits a day. Crickett’s quip lands perfectly because it is not actually a joke. It’s a preview of the next management fad, wherein we replace one bad productivity proxy (lines of code) with an even worse…

A new security bypass has users installing AI agent OpenClaw — whether they intended to or not. Researchers have discovered that a compromised npm publish token pushed an update for the widely-used Cline command line interface (CLI) containing a malicious postinstall script. That script installs the wildly popular, but increasingly condemned, agentic application OpenClaw on the unsuspecting user’…

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Thursday changed its policies regarding AI-generated code to “explicitly require that contributors understand the code they submit to us and that comments and documentation be authored by a human.” The EFF policy statement was vague about how it would determine compliance, but analysts and others watching the space speculate that spot checks are the most l…