Best Programming Master

The AI coding editor Cursor announced the launch of Cursor 2.0, the next iteration of the platform, featuring a new interface for working with multiple agents and its first ever coding model. The new multi-agent interface centers around agents instead of files. With this new interface, up to eight agents can work in parallel, using git worktrees and remote trees to prevent them from interfering with each other. It also allows developers to have multiple models attempt the same problem and see which one produces the best output. While this new interface is designed for agents, developers will still be able to open files or switch back to the classic IDE as needed. The new coding model, Composer, is four times faster than similar models, the company claims. It was designed for low-latency agentic coding tasks in Cursor, and it can complete most turns in less than 30 seconds. It was trained on a variety of tools, including codebase-wide semantic search, which makes it capable of under...

Organizations are spending huge dollars on AI agents, but are finding that integrating the agents into all the systems the business needs to function is a very high hurdle. To help make SaaS platforms agent-ready, integration orchestration company Workato released Workato Enterprise MCP , which the company said in its announcement can “turn existing workflows, integrations, and APIs into rich, multi-step agent skills that any large-language-model (LLM)-based agent can call, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Cursor.” Adam Seligman, chief technology officer at Workato, told SD Times that “the thing we keep coming back to over and over again is agents show a lot of promise, but to really work for business, they have to get access to business data. And they have to be able to do things inside your business, but do it in a way that you trust. And it’s really hard to get those two things right.” One of the reasons that organizations aren’t yet trusting their agents to do the right th...

During its annual conference, GitHub Universe, GitHub shared its plans for Agent HQ, its vision for the future of the platform where AI agents are natively integrated across all of GitHub. As part of this Agent HQ initiative, over the next several months, paid GitHub Copilot users will gain direct access to popular coding agents from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Cognition, xAI, and more. Agent HQ brings with it several new capabilities to support this next evolution, the first of which is mission control, a central command center for assigning, steering, and tracking the work of multiple agents across GitHub, Copilot CLI, and VS Code. Mission control’s branch controls gives developers granular oversight over running checks for code created by the agents. Identity features will also be introduced to allow developers to manage agents like they would other coworkers and control which agent is building a task, manage access, and implement policies. Other mission control features include ...

The Eclipse Foundation today introduced the Agent Definition Language (ADL), an open language and visual toolkit for defining agent behavior. It was introduced as a part of the Eclipse Language Models Operating System (LMOS) project, an open source platform for building and running multi-agent systems. “Agentic AI is redefining enterprise software, yet until now there has been no open source alternatives to proprietary offerings,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “With Eclipse LMOS and ADL, we’re delivering a powerful, open platform that any organisation can use to build scalable, intelligent, and transparent agentic systems.” According to the Eclipse Foundation, ADL allows both business and engineering teams to collaborate on defining agent behavior in a maintainable and versionable way. It separates business logic from prompts, which makes it easier to build agents that can change. It is designed so that engineers set it up initially and then ...

We’ve all witnessed the AI boom over the past few years, but these seismic tech shifts don’t just materialize out of thin air. As companies rush to deploy AI models and AI-powered apps, we’re seeing a parallel surge in complexity. That growth is a threat to your system’s uptime and availability. It boils down to the sheer volume of interconnected components and dependencies. Each one introduces a new failure point that demands rigorous validation. This is exacerbated when, at the same time, AI is accelerating deployment velocities. This is why Chaos Engineering has never been more critical. And not as a sporadic check-the-box activity, but as a core, organization-wide discipline. Fault Injection via Chaos Engineering is the proven method to uncover failure modes lurking between services and apps. Integrate it into your testing regimen to plug those holes before they  trigger expensive incidents. Chaos Engineering Was Born in a Tech Explosion Those of us who’ve been around a wh...

OpenAI today announced that it has completed the restructuring of its business. When the company was founded in 2015, it was launched as a non-profit organization and that non-profit has controlled the for-profit arm of the business. Today’s restructuring turns the for-profit arm into a public benefit corporation called OpenAI PBC. The OpenAI Foundation—the new name for the non-profit—will still control the for-profit and hold a 26% equity stake in OpenAI PBC, which is currently valued at around $130 billion. Being a public benefit corporation differs from traditional corporate structures in that they are “required to advance its stated mission and consider the broader interests of all stakeholders, ensuring the company’s mission and commercial success advance together,” OpenAI’s website explains . According to Bret Taylor, chair of the OpenAI board of directors, the more OpenAI succeeds, the more the OpenAI Foundation’s equity will be worth, which it can use to fund philanthropic w...

As another year draws to a close, experts have begun looking ahead to how the technology landscape will evolve over the course of the next one. Forrester today released its 2026 predictions , with many of them relating to how software development will continue to be impacted by AI. Vibe coding took off in 2025, but next year, Forrester thinks it will evolve into vibe engineering, moving from just generating code to encompassing the full software development lifecycle. Today’s AI tools often produce problematic code, but Forrester believes these tools may improve enough in 2026 that they will be able to deliver engineering-grade outputs. The analysts also believe that there will be 20% fewer students enrolling in CS programs at universities, citing recent difficulties in new graduates finding jobs. They recommend CS professors update their courses to include AI material so that students will have the AI development skills employers are looking for. At the same time, it will take twi...

Microsoft has announced a public preview for a new feature that aims to enable Copilot in Visual Studio to tackle more complex projects. With its new planning capability in Agent Mode, Copilot will research the codebase to break down big tasks into smaller and more manageable tasks, while also iterating on its plan as it works through the steps. “Planning makes Copilot more predictable and consistent by giving it a structured way to reason about your project. It builds on techniques from hierarchical and closed-loop planning research – enabling Copilot to plan at a high level, execute step-by-step, and adjust dynamically as it learns more about your codebase and issues encountered during implementation,” Rhea Patel, product manager at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post . In practice, when Copilot receives a prompt, it will decide if it should respond directly or switch into planning. Simple prompts will receive a quick answer, while multi-step prompts will trigger planning. Planning wi...

GitKraken, a software engineering intelligence company that specializes in improving the developer experience, announced the launch of GitKraken Insights to provide companies with better insights into AI’s impact on developer productivity. According to the company, while many engineering teams have adopted AI at this point, it is still a challenge to prove AI’s ROI. GitKraken also believes that traditional engineering metrics weren’t designed for the AI era. Matt Johnston, CEO of Gitkraken, told SD Times that despite the incremental investments in and perceived velocity gains from AI, they struggle to understand the impact. “I was talking to a VP of developer experience at a large Silicon Valley company, and he was basically saying,  ‘We’ve made investments of thousands of seats in Cursor and Copilot and Cloud, and we can’t really tell what’s being used… and how the heck do I measure this in a way that’s compelling to my business leaders.” GitKraken Insights brings together s...

AWS has announced updates to its Customer Carbon Footprint Tool (CCFT) , its solution that allows customers to track the carbon emissions their AWS usage causes. The CCFT uses the Greenhouse Gas Protocol ’s classification system that groups emissions into three categories. Scope 1 measures direct emissions, such as those from company facilities or vehicles, while Scope 2 and 3 measure indirect emissions. Scope 2 focuses on upstream emissions produced indirectly, such as fuel and energy use or waste generated during operations, while Scope 3 measures indirect downstream emissions, such as those from transportation and distribution of acquired products or end-of-life treatment of those products. Previously, the CCFT measured Scope 1 and 2 emissions, but now the company is also incorporating Scope 3 emissions, as well as adding another category to Scope 1 emissions. CCFT now tracks refrigerants and natural gas in its Scope 1 emissions, adding to the existing Scope 1 emissions coming fr...

Mabl announces updates to Agentic Testing Teammate The Agentic Testing Teammate works alongside human testers to make the process more efficient. New updates include AI vectorizations and test semantic search, improvements to test coverage, and enhancements to the MCP Server that enable testers to do a number of tasks directly within their IDE, including Test Impact Analysis, intelligent test creation, and failure recommendations. “This new work is built on the idea that an agent can become an integral part of your testing team,” said Dan Belcher, co-founder of mabl. “Unlike scripting frameworks and general-purpose large language models, mabl builds deep knowledge about your application over time and uses that knowledge to make it–and your team–more effective.” Couchbase 8.0 adds three new vector indexing and retrieval capabilities These new capabilities are designed to support diverse vector workloads that facilitate real-time AI applications. Hyperscale Vector Index is based on ...

Harness is on a mission to make it easier for developers to do database migrations with its new AI-Powered Database Migration Authoring feature. This new capability allows users to describe schema changes in natural language to receive a production-ready migration. For example, a developer could ask “Create a table named animals with columns for genus_species and common_name. Then add a related table named birds that tracks unladen airspeed and proper name. Add rows for Captain Canary, African swallow, and European swallow.” Harness’ platform would then analyze the current schema and policies, generate a backward-compatible migration, validate the change for safety and compliance, commit it to Git for testing, and create rollback migrations. “This is more than an incremental feature – it’s a step toward AI-native DevOps, where systems understand intent, enforce policy, and automate delivery from code to cloud to database,” Harness wrote in a blog post . This new capability is a par...

Opsera Inc., the leader in AI-powered DevOps platforms, today unveiled its next-generation platform, establishing itself as the industry’s first end-to-end AI-driven DevOps solution. The release introduces the breakthrough Hummingbird AI Reasoning Agent, “Insights in a Box” for instant actionable intelligence, native integration with GitHub’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), now officially listed in GitHub’s MCP registry and a redesigned user experience. ‘Insights in a Box’ for GitHub ecosystem: Instant, Actionable DevOps Intelligence Opsera now delivers “Insights in a Box,” a fully integrated, AI-powered package that provides real-time visibility, Code AI assistant usage and adoption, impact, value, productivity metrics, and predictive recommendations from Day One. Without complex integrations or setup, teams gain contextual, data-driven intelligence to make faster decisions, reduce risk, and optimize software delivery outcomes. This solution combines enterprise-grade control an...

I spent decades mastering software architecture, only to discover that 70% of my hard-won expertise could now be delivered by AI in seconds. This should have terrified me. Instead, it set me free. Let me back up. I started my career as a software engineer and quickly progressed through the ranks to architect. Around the start of this century, Microsoft launched their Microsoft Certified Architects program—an exclusive certification requiring peer review of real-world architecture case studies. I flew to Singapore for my board review and became one of only 40 architects worldwide to earn that certification before Microsoft sunset the program due to costs. I co-authored a book on Professional UML with Visio, back when UML was the graphical standard for designing architecture. I’m telling you this not to wave credentials, but to establish something important: I lived and breathed architecture for years. And through all that experience, I discovered something fundamental. READ PART 1: W...

Red Hat is helping development teams speed up their workflows with the launch of a new portfolio of generative AI solutions called Red Hat Developer Lightspeed. “As the business world moves toward more specialized, domain-specific AI assistants, the demand for raw generative power evolves to delivering trustworthy, reliable and contextually relevant assistance. Red Hat Developer Lightspeed addresses this need by providing purpose-built AI tools that are deeply integrated into the software development lifecycle,” the company wrote in an announcement. Red Hat Developer Lightspeed has been integrated into both the Red Hat Developer Hub and the migration toolkit for applications (MTA) . In the Red Hat Developer Hub, it acts as an assistant to speed up non-coding tasks, like exploring application design approaches, writing documentation, generating test plans, and troubleshooting applications. Developers can use any public or self-hosted LLM to power Red Hat Developer Lightspeed, provi...

GitKraken, a company that specializes in improving the developer experience, today announced the launch of GitKraken Insights to provide companies with better insights into AI’s impact on developer productivity. According to the company, while many engineering teams have adopted AI at this point, it is still a challenge to prove AI’s ROI. GitKraken also believes that traditional engineering metrics weren’t designed for the AI era. “DORA metrics can tell you if deployment frequency changed, but they can’t tell you why,” the company wrote in a blog post . “Pull request counts might go up, but is that because developers are more productive, or because AI is generating code that requires more review cycles?” GitKraken Insights brings together several different metrics—DORA metrics, code quality analysis, technical debt tracking, AI impact measurement, and developer experience indicators—to paint a picture of what’s happening within the development lifecycle. The new offering was built ...

Spotify today announced that Spotify Portal for Backstage is now generally available, providing developers with a ready-to-use version of Backstage, its open source solution for building internal developer portals (IDPs). “Built on a decade of experience improving developer experience at scale, Spotify Portal combines developer velocity, operational insight, and AI-powered assistance into a single pane of glass. It’s the proven foundation for organizations that want to harness AI and platform engineering together to transform developer experience into a measurable business advantage,” Spotify wrote in an announcement. As part of this general availability release, the company added several new features to help further improve developer experience. It now includes access to Confidence, which is Spotify’s internal product experimentation platform that allows development teams to design, run, and analyze experiments within Spotify Portal so that they can validate ideas faster. Another ...

Couchbase, Inc. , the developer data platform for critical applications in our AI world, today announced Couchbase 8.0 , delivering end-to-end AI data lifecycle support for enterprises building AI applications and agentic systems. With the introduction of three distinct vector indexing and retrieval capabilities that support a variety of diverse vector workloads, Couchbase 8.0 provides a scalable, high performing, AI-ready data platform for building context-aware, real-time AI applications. Available for self-managed and Capella-based deployments, Couchbase 8.0, supports billion-scale vector search with millisecond latency, and tunable recall accuracy, at a low TCO across on-premises, cloud and edge deployments. “Scaling AI requires a developer database platform built for speed, throughput and reliability. With support for our Hyperscale Vector Indexing (HVI) and end-to-end RAG workflows, Couchbase stands out from other offerings in the market by providing more flexible and comprehens...

The Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS) today announced a new open source orchestration platform for process automation. The project, Fluxnova , provides audit-ready workflows so that companies can visualize and automate their processes, which is a crucial foundation for being able to modernize operations and maintain strong governance. It comes with a toolkit that developers can use to create and deploy Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) and Decision Model and Notation (DMN) models. These models enable business teams to have full visibility into where work sits, what comes next, and how service-level agreements are being met. Other key benefits include the ability to adapt to changes, advanced auditing, easy migration from legacy systems, a predictable long-term model under the FINOS, and a standards-first design incorporating AI, decision automation, and event-driven systems. Fluxnova was developed in partnership with Fidelity Investments, NatWest Group, Deutsche Bank,...

Sonar, a company that specializes in code quality, today announced a new solution that will improve how LLMs are trained for coding purposes. According to the company, LLMs that are used to help with software development are often trained on publicly available, open source code containing security issues and bugs, which become amplified throughout the training process. “Even a small amount of flawed data can degrade models of any size, disproportionately degrading their output,” Sonar wrote in an announcement . SonarSweep (now in early access) aims to mitigate those issues by ensuring that models are learning from high-quality, secure examples. It works by identifying and fixing code quality and security issues in the training data itself. After analyzing the dataset, it applies a strict filtering process to remove low-quality code while also balancing the updated dataset to ensure it will still offer diverse and representative learning. Some potential use cases for SonarSweep inc...

Companies today want to leverage their data to support business intelligence (BI) initiatives, but without the proper data connectivity processes and tools in place, that data could remain locked in silos. Enter the  Progress DataDirect Hybrid Data Pipeline (HDP) connectivity solution , which allows companies to securely connect cloud and on-premises data to BI tools. The HDP solution can not only be used to connect data internally, but can also be utilized by SaaS vendors to connect third-party data and reporting tools so they can deliver more value to their customers. For example, Onit, a company that helps companies manage their legal workflows, was finding that customers often would want to bring in their own reporting tools, often requiring custom work to set it up. Onit made an investment in the HDP solution as a way to be able to provide more benefits to its customers without needing to constantly build custom integrations. Thus, Onit started running the Hybrid Data Pip...

InstallAware , a company that provides software installation and repackaging solutions, announced a new tool that allows developers to easily port Windows apps to GNU/Linux or macOS. The Application Porting Toolkit works by installing the open-source Windows compatibility layer, Wine , then translating the setup instructions from the original Windows installer into instructions that can be used on other operating systems. For example, the original Windows setup instructions might specify to create files in “C:\Program Files” and the Application Porting Toolkit will redirect the files into “~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files.” Areas of the setup instructions that refer to the Windows Registry will be forwarded to Wine’s registry hives: “~/.wine/system.reg” and “~/.wine/user.reg.” According to John Gaver, director of InstallAware Skunkworks, this toolkit was inspired by Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit. “Instead of targeting only games, we figured we could support all kinds of applications,”...

AI is quickly becoming pervasive in software development and is changing the way developers build software. However, many enterprises have not invested in the key building blocks to sufficiently leverage this new technology. Software engineering leaders who fail to focus on the foundations of the AI-native era risk dooming their companies to irrelevance while faster, AI-enabled rivals seize innovation, revenue and market dominance. According to a recent Gartner survey, software engineering leaders who equip their teams with the right AI technologies can achieve productivity improvements of more than 25%. They must establish a new foundation that enables their teams to effectively co-create software with AI. To achieve this, software engineering leaders must invest in five foundational practices to set up their teams for AI-native engineering success. Practice 1: Platform Engineering Software engineering leaders should establish platform engineering teams to provision AI tools for...

Moving into AI-first development is a journey, and we’re all learning together. I want to share some bittersweet lessons from my recent experience that might save you from hitting the same walls I did. The “Secret” Everyone Knows Let’s address the elephant in the room. By now, there are probably a million YouTube videos titled “A Super Secret Trick To Make Your Coding Agent 20x Better.” You know the trick, I know the trick: create a detailed plan in a markdown file and direct the agent to execute it step by step. Armed with this knowledge, my trusted army of agents and I were happy campers for several days of non-stop AI coding. In AI terms, that’s significant—countless tokens, kilowatts of electricity, and increasingly capable agents working in harmony. It was an idyll with me being the conductor of the agentic orchestra, or if you want a warmer metaphor, my agents being trusty golden retrievers happily bringing the ball back over and over again. The project grew to 158 source cod...