InfoWorld

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…

A new critical vulnerability in the Ruby on Rails (“Rails”) web application framework, CVE-2026-66066 , could turn a seemingly innocuous image into a front door to your secrets. Disclosed July 30, the high severity CVE (scored 9.5 out of 10) poses a significant risk to enterprises running apps that handle user-uploaded images in Rails. Dubbed “KindaRails2Shell,” it targets the overly-trusting Act…

SnapLogic has introduced its new SnapGPT, an agentic assistant that helps enterprise teams plan, build, understand, and operate integrations through natural language. Unveiled July 28 and described as the company’s most-significant advancement in SnapGPT since 2023, the new SnapGPT evolves from an AI-powered integration copilot into an agentic assistant for the integration life cycle, combining p…

AWS on Tuesday released Kiro Crew, an open-source orchestration platform designed to help enterprises move beyond interactive AI coding assistants toward long-running, autonomous engineering workflows that span repositories, developer tools, and multiple work sessions. Rather than simply generating code, Kiro Crew coordinates multiple AI agents, schedules recurring work, preserves project context…

Security flaws in automated workflows in the GitHub repository for Google’s Agent Development Kit for Python could allow public-facing AI agents to trigger more privileged automation, opening one path to manipulate pull-request reviews and another to expose credentials, according to a report from Pillar Security. The first attack path involved a triage agent that analyzed pull requests submitted …

Most folks seem happy to let AI write their LinkedIn posts for them. Others, myself included, have AI draft their work memos or slide decks. And some, according to recent survey data highlighted by AI Secret , are happy to let AI do their grocery shopping for them (28%), but not handle luxury goods or banking (6%). In trying to uncover a guiding principle for when mere mortals are willing to cede…

Not long ago, I worked with an enterprise that believed it had done everything right. The company had spread workloads across multiple regions, replicated key data stores, documented failover procedures, and invested heavily in automation. On paper, it looked like a mature cloud deployment. Then a control-plane issue hit one of its core providers. The infrastructure itself was not entirely gone, …

Advancing on software development, GitHub has announced the public preview of stacked pull requests. The public preview was announced July 30 . Stacked pull requests break large changes into a chain of smaller, dependent pull requests. A stacked pull request is an ordered series of pull requests that each represent focused layers of a change,” GitHub said in the announcement. The goal is to make …