InfoWorld

Four months ago, a front-end engineer on my team looking to make upgrades to a product or feature would have filed a ticket and waited for the infrastructure group to unblock them. They might have lost a day, sometimes a week. Today, that same engineer makes changes themselves. The code is occasionally brittle, but it works, and the end result ships in a fraction of the time it used to take. That…

Yet another AI model has escaped from a cybersecurity test lab: This time, it’s the Chinese company Moonshot’s Kimi K3 model on the run. Frontier Security spotted that Kimi K3 had found a loophole in the UK AI Safety Institute’s test environment for AI models performing cybersecurity tasks. The news follows similar exploits by models from OpenAI, which attacked Hugging Face , Anthropic , and most…

Bending Spoons has snapped up Airtable to add to its portfolio of software companies, alongside AOL, Evernote, WeTransfer, Brightcove and Vimeo Airtable made its name as a builder of low/no code database services , aimed particularly at non-technical staff, but is now one of many vendors facing financial difficulties in the face of the SaaS/AIpocalypse . The arrival of AI coding tools, which offe…

A Canadian hacker has admitted being part of a group responsible for several major cyberattacks. Connor Riley Moucka pleaded guilty to being part of a coterie of hackers that hit 165 organizations, resulting in the theft of customer records and the extortion of millions of dollars. Industry sources have identified Moucka as one of the main players in attacks on data hosted by cloud data warehouse…

Demis Hassabis, the driving force behind Google DeepMind, is ascending to the role of chief scientist at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, replacing Jeff Dean who is leaving to work at a start-up. The role will enable Hassabis to “put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI,” or artificial general intelligence, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote on the company’s Inside Google blog…

After two decades of cloud architecture consulting, I see an unchanging pattern in enterprise deployments. Organizations approach me with unexpectedly high cloud bills, operational chaos, and architectures that look good on paper but cause headaches in production. The common thread is almost always the same. Fundamental concepts that should be foundational to any cloud deployment are treated as o…

Microsoft has released code-testing-generator , an open-source agent for generating unit tests in any programming language, according to the company. Released July 31 , the code-testing-generator agent learns from the user’s repository, then plans, writes, and checks the tests to prove that they work. Currently the agent writes unit tests only. Integration tests, end-to-end tests, browser tests, …

Meta has released a beta coding agent designed to handle complex software assignments across large codebases. Available for macOS and Linux, Muse Code uses the company’s new Muse Spark 1.2 model. It includes specialized background agents that remain active throughout a session instead of being created separately for individual tasks. The agents carry out work asynchronously and decide when to rep…

Agents have turned up just about everywhere in software this past year, with one conspicuous exception: data. That’s a little odd, because querying data is exactly the kind of structured, checkable task that agents excel at. The likeliest culprit is timing. Large language models have only been reliably good at writing SQL for the last six to nine months, and the field hasn’t caught up to what tha…

Microsoft has unveiled a suite of IQ products over the last few months. Work IQ, Fabric IQ, and Foundry IQ build on what Microsoft used to call its “Graphs,” the underlying data architecture that underpins its cloud services. These graphs provided a way to query the data your business uses, treating that data as nodes in a graph database and using the GraphQL API model to extract that data — for …

Java Development Kit (JDK) 28 , a non-LTS (Long-Term Support) or “feature release” of standard Java due in March 2027, has started to take shape. Features listed for JDK 28 now include a preview of value objects, switching the default mode of the Shenandoah generational garbage collector, and strict field initialization in the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). As a non-LTS release, JDK 28 will be backe…

Visual Studio Code 1.132, the latest version of Microsoft’s popular, open-source code editor, has been released. The brings improvements to built-in dictation, side chats, and support for commenting on web elements in the integrated browser. VS Code 1.132 was released August 5 . The update can be downloaded for Windows, Linux, and macOS at code.visualstudio.com . With VS Code 1.132, the built-in …

AWS is finally adding native vector search to its managed NoSQL database DynamoDB, which is typically used to store high-volume operational and transactional data. The update, according to analysts, removes complexity for development teams that are trying to maintain separate vector databases for a rapidly growing class of AI and agentic applications that rely on real-time access to operational a…

AI agent orchestration platforms coordinate role-based and task-based AI agents, along with the tools, data, and people they depend on, into multistep workflows. These platforms are highly important for organizations scaling from handfuls to thousands of AI agents running in production. Two open standards do the connective work: MCP (Model Context Protocol) gives agents governed access to tools a…

I hope you’ll indulge me this week as I take a break from my usual rantings about agentic coding and meander down memory lane . I learned to code BASIC in the mid-1970s at my progressive junior high school. In math class. We took Fridays to learn about line numbers, loops, statements, and the amazing GOSUB , which was as close as we got to a function call. It strikes me that it was pretty early i…