Best Programming Master

Over the weekend, I was looking to book flights for holidays. All excited, I was able to find a decent price for my family to head for some sunshine later this summer. I reached the payment stage, and that’s where the excitement and smile stopped. I was waiting for confirmation that my payment was finalizing, but then the system took a turn, and I was back on the booking page. Even more, I now had a higher price to pay for the flights. Did I continue with booking, NOOOOOO. The website had let me down, taking away all the joy and excitement I had built up. I just shut the laptop and cried in a corner.  (#WillDamienGoOnHolidays) UI automation promises efficiency, reliability, and a significant reduction in testing headaches. But let’s be honest, the road to seamless automation is not always smooth. If you have ever found your meticulously crafted test scripts failing unexpectedly, you’re not alone. In the world of UI automation, the phrase, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try a...

Anthropic starts testing a Claude extension for Chrome The extension will enable Claude to take action on websites on behalf of the user. “We’ve spent recent months connecting Claude to your calendar, documents, and many other pieces of software. The next logical step is letting Claude work directly in your browser,” the company says. The company is starting off with a small pilot of 1,000 Max plan users, and will gradually expand the program out to more people if the pilot goes well. According to Anthropic, one of the big safety challenges with agents that use the browser is prompt injection attacks, and some of the steps the company has taken to defend against them are providing site-level permissions and requiring action confirmations. This pilot will test how well those defenses hold up in real-world scenarios. Google integrates Gemini CLI into Zed code editor Google announced that it has brought the Gemini CLI to the open source code editor, Zed. The new integration will en...

Google has announced that it has brought the Gemini CLI to the open source code editor, Zed. The new integration will enable Zed users to generate and refactor code in the editor, get instant answers on code or error messages, and chat naturally in the terminal. Developers will be able to follow along live with the Gemini agent as it makes changes. Once the agent is done working, Zed will display the changes in a review interface that shows a clear diff for each edit that can be reviewed, accepted, or modified, providing the same level of control as a code review. Users will also be able to provide context beyond the codebase by pointing the agent to external sources like a URL with documentation or an API spec. This integration is possible because Zed created the Agent Client Protocol (ACP) to enable third-party agents to work directly in the platform. “Because software developers rely on diverse tools in a variety of different tech stacks, we see room for multiple agents comp...

Microsoft has released the August update for Visual Studio 2022, adding several features related to AI-assisted development. The company announced that GPT-5 is now integrated into the IDE, and support for MCP is generally available as well. MCP support enables developers to authenticate with any OAuth provider directly from the IDE, perform one-click installation of MCP servers, and manage MCP access from GitHub policy settings. Copilot Chat was updated with the ability to surface relevant code snippets more reliably using improved semantic code search to determine when queries should trigger a code lookup. Developers can now connect models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic to Visual Studio Chat, as well. Copilot Chat also now has full context of the user’s Git history, allowing developers to reference commits and uncommitted changes when engaging with the chat functionality. Another new update is that developers can sign up for GitHub Copilot using their Google account directly ...

The product analytics company Amplitude is announcing new self-service capabilities that will enable marketing and growth teams to run user experiments without waiting on development teams. “Every click and conversion matters, and marketers can’t afford to wait weeks just to test an idea. Unfortunately, that’s the reality with most legacy experimentation tools: visual editors break on modern sites, simple changes require developer support, and even when a test runs, the results don’t connect back to the metrics you actually use,” Amplitude wrote in a blog post . The company is launching four new Web Experimentation features, including rearrange elements, control variant editing, group cohort targeting, and out-of-the-box widgets. Customers will now be able to visually move elements around on a page themselves using a drag-and-drop editing style. Control variant editing allows marketing teams to update the default user experience themselves. Marketers will also now be able to targe...

Android will soon require app developers to go through an identity verification process before their apps can be installed on users’ devices—regardless of if the apps are downloaded through the Play Store or sideloaded. “Think of it like an ID check at the airport, which confirms a traveler’s identity but is separate from the security screening of their bags; we will be confirming who the developer is, not reviewing the content of their app or where it came from,” Suzanne Frey, VP of Product, Trust & Growth for Android, wrote in a blog post . Google will be starting an early access program for verification in October 2025, where participants can join a community discussion forum, get priority support for the new rules, and be able to provide feedback. Then, starting in March 2026, all developers will be able to start verification. Verification requirements will go into effect in September 2026 in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand, and then expand to other countries the...

Today at the Open Source Summit Europe, The Linux Foundation announced that the open-source document database, DocumentDB, would be joining the foundation and be released under the MIT license. DocumentDB was created by Microsoft and launched earlier this year. Since its release, it has gained 1.9k stars and hundreds of contributions, feedback, and users, according to the Linux Foundation. It started as a pair of PostgreSQL extensions to support popular BSON data models and document queries in the PostgreSQL ecosystem. With the recent addition of a gateway protocol transition layer, it has since evolved into a MongoDB compatible solution as well. Microsoft says that it is donating the project to the Linux Foundation for a couple of reasons. First, the foundation will help establish a standard for document databases, similar to what ANSI SQL did for relational databases. Second, it will provide a place for any database provider to continue. And finally, open-source Postgres will be f...

Agent Mode in Gemini Code Assist now available in VS Code and IntelliJ This mode was introduced last month to the Insiders Channel for VS Code to expand the capabilities of Code Assist beyond prompts and responses to support actions like multiple file edits, full project context, and built-in tools and integration with ecosystem tools. Since being added to the Insiders Channel, several new features have been added , including the ability to edit code changes using Gemini’s Inline diff, user-friendly quota updates, real-time shell command output, and state preservation between IDE restarts. Separately, the company also announced new agentic capabilities in its AI Mode in Search, such as the ability to set dinner reservations based on factors like party size, date, time, location, and preferred type of food. U.S. users opted into the AI Mode experiment in Labs will also now see results that are more specific to their own preferences and interests. Google also announced that AI Mode i...

HoundDog.ai today announced the general availability of its expanded privacy-by-design static code scanner, now purpose-built to address privacy risks in AI applications. Addressing the growing concerns around data leaks in AI workflows, the new release enables security and privacy teams to enforce guardrails on the types of sensitive data embedded in large language model (LLM) prompts or exposed in high-risk AI data sinks, such as logs and temporary files, all before any code is pushed to production and privacy violations occur. HoundDog.ai is a privacy-focused static code scanner designed to identify unintentional mistakes by developers or AI-generated code that could expose sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII), protected health information (PHI), cardholder data (CHD) and authentication tokens across risky mediums like logs, files, local storage and third-party integrations. Since its launch from stealth in May 2024, HoundDog.ai has been adopted by a g...

R Systems International Limited, a global leader in digital product engineering, today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Novigo Solutions, a specialist in low-code/no-code (LCNC) development and intelligent-automation services. The strategic acquisition creates a global digital product engineering services powerhouse with INR 20,600M (~$240M) revenue and INR 3,800M (~$45M) EBITDA, offering engineering, deployment, and management of enterprise-scale fleets of AI agents under a single, governed platform. Novigo has been growing strongly and delivered 44% revenue CAGR over the last three years with 25% EBITDA margin and healthy free cash flow. The upfront cash consideration for the transaction is INR 400 cr, with an additional stock consideration linked to future EBITDA achievement. The acquisition will be EPS accretive for R Systems since year 1. This strategic move positions R Systems well to address the evolving market landscape, as enterprises rea...

Microsoft has been adding several new diagnostics features to Copilot in Visual Studio for .NET to make the debugging process easier. “The same tools you rely on are now able to keep up with you, identify issues more quickly, offer context-smart fixes, and help you move from asking ‘why is this broken?’ to ‘oh, I see and here’s the fix’ in a fraction of the time,” Harshada Hole, senior product manager for Visual Studio Debugging, Profiling, and Diagnostics, wrote in a blog post . Copilot can now suggest appropriate locations for breakpoints and tracepoints based on current context. Similarly, it can troubleshoot non-binding breakpoints and walk developers through the potential cause, such as mismatched symbols or incorrect build configurations. Another new feature is the ability to generate LINQ queries on massive collections in the IEnumerable Visualizer, which renders data into a sortable, filterable tabular view. For example, a developer could ask for a LINQ query that will sur...

GitHub has added a new panel to its UI that enables developers to invoke the Copilot coding agent from anywhere on the site. The coding agent was launched a few months ago, allowing developers to assign an issue to it and have it work in the background and create a draft pull request. The functionality was limited to GitHub Issues, but now developers will be able to delegate a task to the agent from any page on GitHub’s site. According to the company, this new Agents panel is “your mission control center for agentic workflows on GitHub.” From the panel, developers can assign background tasks, monitor running tasks, or review pull requests. The panel is a lightweight overlay on GitHub.com, but developers can also open the panel in full-screen mode by clicking “View all tasks.” The agent can be launched from a single prompt, like “Add integration tests for LoginController” or “Fix #877 using pull request #855 as an example.” It can also run multiple tasks simultaneously, such as “Ad...

Black Duck adds new security app to GitHub Marketplace The Black Duck Security GitHub App enables static application security testing (SAST) and software composition analysis (SCA) scans in GitHub repositories. Scans are triggered automatically by code commits and pull requests, and results are added as comments to the pull request if issues are detected. It also provides automated fix pull requests for vulnerable dependencies, customizable policy enforcement, and automated SARIF report integration with GitHub Advanced Security Dashboards. Preview of NuGet MCP Server now available Last month, Microsoft announced support for building MCP servers with .NET and then publishing them to NuGet. Now, the company is announcing an official NuGet MCP Server to integrate NuGet package information and management tools into AI development workflows. “Since the NuGet package ecosystem is always evolving, large language models (LLMs) get out-of-date over time and there is a need for something th...

Codeglide.ai , a subsidiary of the DevOps company Opsera, is launching its MCP server lifecycle platform that will enable developers to turn APIs into MCP servers. The solution constantly monitors API changes and updates the MCP servers accordingly. It also provides context-aware, secure, and stateful AI access without the developer needing to write custom code.   According to Opsera, large enterprises may maintain 2,000 to 8,000 APIs — 60% of which are legacy APIs — and MCP provides a way for AI to efficiently interact with those APIs. The company says that this new offering can reduce AI integration time by 97% and costs by 90%. “AI can’t deliver its full potential if your APIs are stuck in the past,” said Kumar Chivukula, Co-founder and CEO at Opsera. “Enterprises are struggling to connect their data to AI models because today’s APIs weren’t built for context, memory, or intent. Codeglide.ai changes that by delivering a continuous MCP server lifecycle platform that seaml...

For decades, software testing has been built on a simple idea: humans write tests, machines run them. That model has persisted since the first commercial recorders appeared in the mid-1990s. Testers would record a flow, edit a script, maintain it as the application evolved, and repeat the cycle endlessly. Tools improved incrementally, but the basic process remained frozen in time. Now consider the near future, and in some organizations, the present, where the entire process after business requirements are defined is performed by generative AI. No recorder. No script writer. No armies of QA engineers. Just AI transforming requirements into test cases, test cases into executable scripts, and scripts into immense application coverage. This is not science fiction. It is the trajectory of QA. Why Recorders Belong in a Museum Recorders were useful in 1995 because they offered an alternative to writing raw code. They captured user actions, saved them as a script, and allowed reruns. But t...

Testing company BrowserStack has announced a new Chrome extension called Testing Toolkit that includes 11 different manual web testing tools.  According to the company, manual web testing has been very fragmented, and QA teams are often switching between multiple different apps and accounts, leading to unnecessary context switching and lost time.  The Testing Toolkit acts as a single tool to tackle the work of many, spanning the entire testing life cycle, including setup, execution, and bug reporting. The 11 tools include: Live cross-browser testing across 3,500 browsers Responsiveness testing Accessibility testing The ability to overlay Figma designs on a webpage to discover visual differences Bug reporting with automated screenshots, console logs, network data, and system information AI powered test generation Cookie manager for searching, adding, editing, and deleting cookies Cache manager to control what gets cleared and over what time period JSON formatter ...

Anthropic expands Claude Sonnet 4’s context window to 1M tokens With this larger context window, Claude can process codebases with 75,000+ lines of code in a single request. This allows it to better understand project architecture, cross-file dependencies, and make suggestions that fit with the complete system design. Longer context windows are now in beta on the Anthropic API and Amazon Bedrock, and will soon be available in Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.  For prompts over 200K tokens, pricing will increase to $6 / million tokens (MTok) for input and $22.50 / MTok for output. The pricing for requests under 200K tokens will be $3 / MTok for input and $15 / MTok for output.  The company also extended its learning mode designed for students into Claude.ai and Claude Code. Learning mode asks users questions to guide then through concepts instead of providing immediate answers, to promote critical thinking of problems. OpenAI adds GPT-4o as a legacy model in ChatGPT With this ...

Application monitoring company Sentry is making it easier to gain visibility into MCP servers with the launch of a new monitoring tool.  With MCP monitoring , developers can understand things like which clients are experiencing errors, which tools are most used, or which tools are running slow. They can also correlate errors with events like traffic spikes or new release deployments, or figure out if errors are only happening on one type of transport.  According to Cody De Arkland, head of developer experience at Sentry, when Sentry launched its own MCP server, it was getting over 30 million requests per month. He said that at that scale, it’s inevitable that errors will occur, and existing monitoring tools were struggling with MCP servers. “We needed to know things like traffic load and AI client usage, which tools were getting called the most, which were slow or failing, and which inputs were causing things to break. We needed to know all of this without relying on users ...

San Francisco, CA, August 12, 2025 – Install Aware Software, the technology leader in software installation, repackaging, and virtualization solutions for app developers and enterprises, has launched codename “Project OS/3,” an installation virtualization framework built upon InstallAware’s two decades of excellence with platform native installation technologies spanning Linux, macOS, and Windows. “We’re standing on the shoulders of giants,” says John Gaver, Director of InstallAware Skunkworks. “Project OS/3 would not have been possible without three decades of Wine, two and a half decades of Lazarus, and two decades of InstallAware for Windows Installer itself. Our efforts at Skunkworks in bringing all of this together would pale in comparison, seeing as we’ve barely outgrown our toddler phase!” While Wine has long provided the capability to run Windows apps on Linux and macOS, it is technically demanding to get working properly. That is to say nothing of the setups of the Windows ...

Las Vegas—August 12, 2025— Progress Software (Nasdaq: PRGS), the trusted provider of AI-powered digital experience and infrastructure software, today announced at Ai4 2025 the general availability of Progress® MarkLogic® Server 12 . This latest release introduces advanced semantic search and graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) capabilities, empowering organizations to ground generative AI in their own trusted data—delivering more accurate, secure and context-aware results. Unlike other solutions, MarkLogic Server 12 enables scalable, rapid, cost-effective retrieval, on-premises or in the cloud. Key features include native vector search, Virtual Views for ad-hoc analysis, BM25 relevance ranking and advanced semantic algorithms, all designed to maximize retrieval accuracy and efficiency for enterprise generative AI and analytics. Global research institutions and public sector organizations are already leveraging Progress’ semantic search and graph RAG capabilities to extract d...