InfoWorld

Software development is rarely a one-person job. A request or an idea may begin with a product manager or another employee, before moving through developers, designers, reviewers, and other stakeholders on its way to becoming working code. Salesforce now wants to put an AI coding agent directly into that workflow to reduce the number of handoffs and additional time involved in moving a software p…

Malicious versions of three Rust packages, including the widely used arrayref, were published to the crates.io registry on August 20, carrying a backdoor that executed automatically when affected projects were compiled. Security researchers at Wiz said the attack also shares infrastructure with recent supply-chain campaigns attributed to North Korean threat actors. The compromised releases were “…

Python can’t stop, won’t stop evolving. Python 3.15, due in fall 2026 but available now in its first release candidate, abounds with useful new features worth trying out: lazy imports, a new profiling technology, immutable dictionaries, and its ever-evolving JIT (just-in-time) compiler. Top picks for Python readers on InfoWorld Speed boost your Python programs with new lazy imports Don’t let a fa…

The reported $10 billion deal between Anthropic and AI cloud startup Volta is more than just another big-number headline in the AI infrastructure race. It’s a sign of where cloud computing is headed. When a frontier AI company needs massive amounts of specialized compute, and a relatively young cloud provider claims it can deliver that capacity, billions of dollars shift hands before most enterpr…

Rust is slated to play a huge part in Ubuntu’s future. As a language that allows programmers more control over resource use and performance as well as removing many classes of memory safety issues, it’s an especially good choice for building security-sensitive software. But modernizing huge amounts of the legacy C code that currently powers the Linux operating system has been, and continues to be…

TrueFoundry has launched TrueForge, an open-source agent harness that lets developers build and run AI agents using models from different providers, positioning it as an alternative to Anthropic’s Claude Managed Agents. The San Francisco-based enterprise AI infrastructure startup was founded in 2021 by a team that included former Meta engineers. It initially focused on software for deploying mach…

AI coding assistants are supposed to reduce the work required to turn a developer’s intent into working software. But some users of Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 and Opus 5 models say they are having to spend additional time, prompts, and tokens correcting the models’ language, sometimes even routing their output through cheaper AI models to make it usable. In a detailed GitHub issue , Peter Bower, founde…

Building an AI agent that looks impressive in a demo is now a weekend project. Building one that an enterprise will actually let touch its CRM, its data warehouse, and its customers is a different discipline entirely — and almost none of the challenges associated with shipping an agent live in the model. The challenge is infrastructure around the model, including who it is allowed to be, what it …

Microsoft’s open sourcing of .NET not only has sped up the development of the platform, but also has allowed new languages and features to be built on top of the .NET runtime and compilers. At the same time, the extensibility features of Visual Studio Code make it easy for developers to provide the tooling we need to use those new platform capabilities. One of the more interesting new projects to…

I run 49 scheduled AI agents on one laptop. Another 24 sit beside them, deliberately switched off. That distinction matters more than it sounds. After eighteen months, I have stopped being surprised by model errors. Models misunderstand requests and occasionally produce confident nonsense. I expect that. I test for it. What still catches me is how rarely those errors cause an outage. No serious f…

AI coding tools are increasingly becoming the place where developers write and modify software. SpaceX-owned Cursor now wants to bring code hosting into that same environment, potentially challenging GitHub’s position as the center of the software development lifecycle (SDLC). The company, earlier this week, launched Origin , an early-beta code-hosting platform that brings repositories, pull requ…

While some organizations are still getting started with their AI strategies, others are in pilot purgatory , with few experiments or proofs of concept (POCs) reaching production. Only 25% of organizations have moved 40% or more of their AI experiments into production, according to The State of AI in the Enterprise . We discussed delivering AI proofs of concept that matter at a recent Coffee With …

Regular readers will probably have figured out that I’m generally an optimist. I think things are always getting better, and the future of the human race looks pretty good. Technology has taken us from grinding poverty to a pretty good life here on Planet Earth. I also believe that life has gotten immensely better for software developers just in the last year. We’ve seen AI agents suddenly and st…

Diffusion models are becoming sophisticated enough that they can reproduce an image even when they don’t have access to the original. In a series of ‘what if’ scenarios, researchers associated with MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) swapped out different training datasets to test the impact on image outputs when original image data was completely removed. It turns…

Open-weight AI models are a big deal, as Nvidia and more than 200 other companies and organizations attested in their “Open Weights and American AI Leadership” letter in July. The question is who will pay for them. Why are they a big deal? Well, former Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst will tell you that “open weights can play the same catalytic role [as open source]” to drive innovation in AI. This isn…