InfoWorld

For many developers, the hard part of building an AI application isn’t the model anymore. It’s keeping the application’s knowledge current. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has become a popular technique for grounding AI applications in enterprise data, but it also introduces a steady stream of operational work, including tasks such as updating embeddings and indexes, synchronizing data sourc…

Meta’s long-awaited Pyrefly linter is out in a 1.0 version, and the forthcoming Python 3.15 has a super-efficient sampling profiler. Plus we have a comprehensive rundown of Python’s indispensable virtual environments — and a warning about a novel breed of malware that exploits Python’s package ecosystem. Top picks for Python readers on InfoWorld How to use virtual environments in Python Isolate a…

AI coding agents are becoming critical to software development, but the configuration files that guide them, such as Agents.md or Claude.md, can be “smelly.” That means they can contain structural flaws, redundancies, or counterproductive workflows that bloat context, waste tokens, and make coding agents less reliable. Researchers from the Department of Computer Science at Brazil’s Federal Univer…

Understanding a reactivity model in the abstract is useful, but it is ultimately incomplete without seeing how it shapes real application code. Concepts such as state, derivation, and explicit dependencies only become meaningful when they influence how forms are built, validated, and maintained in practice. In two previous articles, “ Angular Signal Forms: From event pipelines to signal-driven st…

Databricks is pitching a fix for what it sees as the growing operations mess in enterprise AI. With the launch of Genie ZeroOps, unveiled at its Data + AI Summit, the company is targeting a problem many data teams know too well: it’s no longer building pipelines and models that hurts, it’s keeping them running. As data estates sprawl and AI workloads multiply, engineering time is increasingly eat…

France’s OVHcloud is moving beyond cloud infrastructure into frontier AI model development, a shift that could test whether Europe can produce another serious alternative to US and Chinese AI systems. The company, one of Europe’s leading homegrown cloud providers, plans to train a family of models from scratch and aims to open-source them once they meet its performance targets, CEO Octave Klaba t…

In hardware, when you ship something broken, the consequences are severe and often irreversible. That’s the world I worked in for years, in verification roles at Mellanox and later at Alibaba. The stakes forced the industry to build a rigorous verification culture. You proved designs worked before they left the building. In software, verification disciplines look like CI/CD pipelines, static anal…

The problem with software development today may no longer be writing code. With AI coding assistants generating code faster than ever, the bigger challenge is reviewing, testing, and safely releasing it. AWS is betting that software teams need help with that part of the process, adding release management features to its DevOps Agent. The new features, currently in preview, automatically assess co…

First came vector databases, then RAG. Now, the next frontier in enterprise AI is taking shape: context layers that give autonomous agents a shared understanding of the business, a vision Databricks is advancing with Genie Ontology. Currently in preview, Genie Ontology automatically extracts business context from enterprise data, dashboards, queries, pipelines, documents, and applications and org…

Z.ai has released GLM-5.2, an MIT-licensed open-source AI model designed for long-running software engineering tasks, as the Chinese company seeks to challenge proprietary coding models on cost and performance. The company said GLM-5.2 ranked just behind Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 on FrontierSWE, a long-horizon coding benchmark, trailing it by 1%. Z.ai said the model also edged out OpenAI’s GPT-…

Most generative AI tools know less about R than languages like JavaScript and Python , thanks to how much training data is available for each. However, with a little extra setup, you can give a large language model (LLM) the knowledge it needs to improve its R skills. Here are 10 ways to help generative AI write R code like a pro. Use a coding agent AI coding agents have more power, flexibility, …

Frontend reliability is often discussed in terms of outages. Teams prepare for failed API calls, downtime and visible crashes because those failures are easy to recognize and measure. However, in many modern applications, the bigger challenge is not complete failure but latency. Systems rarely go fully offline. Instead, they become slow enough that users lose confidence in the interface long befo…

I was blessed with a terrific high school English teacher. Ms. Jewel was funny, kind, interesting, and tough on us. I can still spell “ecstasy” on the first try because of her. One of the more memorable lessons she taught was a “Hemingway and Fitzgerald” module. I loved the short stories of both, but Hemingway’s work always stuck out for me. It’s cliché to say that Hemingway was terse, but we onl…

When SpaceX on Tuesday officially announced its plan to purchase AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion in stock, as it had predicted it would do in April , it presented CIOs and developers with a little good news, a little bad news and a massive pile of uncertainty. The details of the proposed acquisition were virtually identical to the terms announced in April, even retaining the $10 billion …

As enterprises rush to build AI agents that can reason over business data and take action, Databricks argues that the long-standing practice of separating operational and analytical data systems is turning into a liability. That separation, the cloud-based data warehouse provider says, is becoming increasingly strained as AI agents require simultaneous access to live operational data and historic…