InfoWorld

Microsoft has released Visual Studio Code 1.129, an update to its free, popular code editor that features a dedicated agent host and an editor panel in the Agents window. The updated editor also allows users to run terminal commands from chat prompts with a ! prefix and offers a preview of a modern UI for the workbench. Released July 15, VS Code 1.129 can be downloaded from code.visualstudio.com …

Ever since Chinese AI startup DeepSeek launched three years ago, enterprise executives have been nervous about relying on Chinese AI models . But now that the latest Chinese AI offerings, Alibaba’s 2.4-trillion-parameter model Qwen3.8 Max and Moonshot’s 2.8-trillion-parameter model Kimi K3 , are promising even more powerful performance, those IT executives are being forced to again ask if these m…

The evolution of Java is the subject of a just-released documentary about the programming language and development platform. “The Java Story: The Official Documentary” tells the story of Java through interviews with the engineers who created it and shepherded it through three decades. Produced by CultRepo and sponsored by Oracle, JetBrains, IBM, and Azul, the documentary follows Java from its set…

AWS has updated AWS Data Exports, its service for generating and managing cost and usage Reports (CURs), to include standardized Amazon Bedrock product metadata, making it easier for enterprise engineering teams to analyze AI usage and spending as they scale AI deployments spanning multiple foundation models. The update extends billing exports with normalized fields for model provider, model name…

Something interesting happened during an internal evaluation of AI meeting transcription tools at Tungsten Automation. The products worked. They weren’t bad. But sitting across from the pricing, we kept asking the same question: what exactly are we paying for? We already had a secure enterprise AI environment. Building a meeting summary workflow took days, not months. We customized the outputs, i…

Site reliability engineers (SREs) have the tough assignment of resolving thorny performance and reliability issues. But their primary mission is to provide devops teams with operational insights and to suggest implementation improvements on business system performance, security, and overall robustness. Google introduced its SRE playbook in 2003, but it took some time for the role’s definition, to…

Last year Anthropic gave away one of the most successful things it has ever built. And, no, I’m not talking about Claude. I’m referring to MCP, the now ubiquitous Model Context Protocol , which Anthropic donated to the Linux Foundation’s new Agentic AI Foundation ⁠. At the time, MCP was pulling nearly 100 million monthly SDK downloads across more than 10,000 active servers⁠, prompting the questio…

OpenAI’s recent update to its Codex coding agent has developers worrying over the impact of the change on large code repositories and long-running AI-assisted sessions. The update to the Codex CLI reduces the default configured input context window for GPT-5.6 to 272,000 tokens from 372,000 tokens. In practice, the update means the coding agent will retain a smaller amount of code, conversation h…

Dear Microsoft, I don’t want to have a love-hate relationship with Visual Studio Code , but you’re making it really hard. Once upon a time, Visual Studio Code was just an editor. You configured it with add-ons to make it do whatever job you needed. And that was great! I gravitated towards using VS Code for multiple jobs in various languages. I could set up a Python workflow with extensions to add…

OpenAI is selling its first hardware — without any help from Jony Ive . It describes the Codex Micro as a “ command center for agentic work ” but it’s really a 13-switch wireless keyboard customized to help developers keep tabs on what their Codex agents are doing. It costs $230. The keyboard has 13 mechanical switches (one keycap covers two of them by default), a rotary encoder, joystick, and RG…

Linus Torvalds has a complicated relationship with AI, seeing both its good and bad points. But his latest remarks on the usefulness of AI may have raised a few eyebrows in open-source circles. Just a few weeks after the Linux founder complained that a “continued flood” of AI-generated vulnerability reports had made the Linux kernel security mailing list “almost entirely unmanageable”, he has com…

OpenAI has finally confirmed reports that its latest family of large language models (LLMs) can accidentally delete files, while stressing that such incidents are rare and should be viewed as “honest mistakes.” Reports of the flagship LLMs deleting files emerged shortly after the company launched them earlier this month, with investor Matt Shumer taking to X to report that GPT-5.6-Sol had “just a…

The Linux Foundation has launched the x402 Foundation, a new industry body that will oversee the x402 payment protocol, an open standard designed to let AI agents, applications, and APIs pay for digital services over HTTP. The x402 protocol, originally developed by Coinbase, embeds payment capabilities directly into web interactions, allowing AI agents, APIs, and applications to send and receive …

Meta is reportedly planning a cloud business that would sell access to AI computing power and models, extending its internal infrastructure into a commercial service for outside developers and enterprises. Reuters, citing Bloomberg’s reporting, noted that the planned offering would allow customers to access AI models hosted on Meta’s infrastructure and pay based on usage, effectively positioning …

Thinking Machines Lab, the San Francisco startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati , has released Inkling, its first general-purpose AI model. The launch adds another US-developed entrant to an open-weight market where Chinese developers produce several leading coding and reasoning models. Inkling uses a mixture-of-experts architecture with 975 billion total parameters, of which 41 billion…