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This week in AI dev tools: GPT-5, Claude Opus 4.1, and more (August 8, 2025)

OpenAI launches GPT-5 OpenAI announced the availability of GPT-5, which it says is “smarter across the board” compared to previous models. Specifically for coding, GPT-5 achieved significant improvement in complex front-end generation and debugging larger repositories. Early testers said that it made better design choices in terms of spacing, typography, and white space, according to the company.  “We think you will love using GPT-5 much more than any previous AI,” CEO Sam Altman said during the livestream. “It is useful. It is smart. It is fast. It’s intuitive.” Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.1 This latest update improves the model’s research and data analysis skills, and achieves 74.5% on SWE-bench Verified (compared to 72.5% on Opus 4).  It is available to paid Claude users, in Claude Code, and on Anthropic’s API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.  The company plans to release larger improvements across its models in the coming weeks as well....

Melissa brings its data quality solutions to Azure with new SSIS integration

Melissa, a provider of data quality solutions, is making it possible for customers to run its SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) components in Azure Data Factory through the Azure-SSIS Integration Runtime. This brings the power of Melissa’s data quality features to the cloud, providing customers greater flexibility in where their data is stored. SSIS is Microsoft’s ETL solution that allows companies to extract and transform data from sources like XML data files, flat files, and relational data sources, then load it into different data destinations, such as SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, Azure Synapse Analytics, or cloud storage. “A lot of clients say ‘hey, we’re still using SSIS, and we would like to do the same thing, but not on my local machine anymore. Now we want to do it in the Azure cloud environment,’” said Ben Nguyen, sales engineer II and software engineer II at Melissa.  This led Melissa to create this integration that would allow its SSIS packages to be seamless...

OpenAI launches GPT-5

During a livestream today, OpenAI announced the availability of GPT-5 , which it says is “smarter across the board” compared to previous models. Specifically for coding, GPT-5 achieved significant improvement in complex front-end generation and debugging larger repositories. Early testers said that it made better design choices in terms of spacing, typography, and white space, according to the company .  “We think you will love using GPT-5 much more than any previous AI,” CEO Sam Altman said during the livestream. “It is useful. It is smart. It is fast. It’s intuitive.” He likened GPT-3 to talking to a high school student, in that sometimes there were flashes of brilliance. Then, GPT-4 was like talking to a college student, with real intelligence and real utility. He says that GPT-5 is like talking to a PhD level expert in any area you need.  The model can answer most questions and leverages a deeper reasoning model for harder problems and a real-time router for deciding ...

Elastic simplifies log analytics for SREs and developers with launch of Log Essentials

Elastic has announced the release of Log Essentials, providing SREs and developers with capabilities for ingesting, searching, visualizing, and alerting on logs. It is designed to enable developers to access observability capabilities without needing to manage the operations, upgrades, or tuning.  “SREs need a hassle-free, scale-as-you-go, high-availability logging solution that empowers them to focus entirely on operational insights, not infrastructure, without the complexity of standing up and maintaining observability tooling,” said Santosh Krishnan, general manager of Observability & Security at Elastic. “Logs Essentials makes it easy to get started with Elastic by offering a simple, reliable path to insights at a lower entry point.” It enables root cause analysis via log search using filters, pattern matching, and event identification.  Users can also use Elastic’s query language, ES|QL; set alerts for error spikes or unusual log volumes; and use Kibana-based visu...

Accelerate tool adoption with a developer experimentation framework

It’s imperative that business leaders can enable their business to work at the speed that technology is moving. However, lengthy and cumbersome approval processes to adopt new tools can hinder an organization’s ability to keep pace, especially when they need to remain compliant with regulations and standards, such as FedRAMP and SOC-2.  With a three-stage developer experimentation framework, organizations can make it easier to evaluate new technologies, determine their fit and accelerate their adoption across the organization. Stage One: Trial The goal of the first stage involves exploratory testing to gauge how a development tool might benefit the organization. The primary objective is to identify concrete applications for the organization through hands-on experimentation. During the trial stage, the tool should be used only by a small cohort of engineers while it’s still new, untested and unvetted. Additionally, the trial stage should be limited to a short period of time for ...

OpenAI releases two open weight reasoning models

OpenAI is joining the open weight model game with the launch of gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b.  Gpt-oss-120b is optimized for production, high reasoning use cases, and gpt-oss-20b is designed for lower latency or local use cases.  According to the company, these open models are comparable to its closed models in terms of performance and capability, but at a much lower cost. For example, gpt-oss-120b running on an 80 GB GPU achieved similar performance to o4-mini on core reasoning benchmarks, while gpt-oss-20b running on an edge device with 16 GB of memory was comparable to o3-mini on several common benchmarks.  “Releasing gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b marks a significant step forward for open-weight models,” OpenAI wrote in a post . “At their size, these models deliver meaningful advancements in both reasoning capabilities and safety. Open models complement our hosted models, giving developers a wider range of tools to accelerate leading edge research, foster innovation...

.NET Aspire’s CLI reaches general availability in 9.4 release

Microsoft has announced the release of .NET Aspire 9.4, which the company says is the largest update yet.  .NET Aspire is a set of tools, templates, and packages that Microsoft provides to enable developers to build distributed apps with observability built in.  With this release, Aspire’s CLI is now generally available and includes four core commands: aspire new (use templates to create an app), aspire add (add hosting integrations), aspire run (run the app from any terminal or editor), and aspire config (view, set, and change CLI settings).  Additionally, there are two new beta commands that can be turned on using aspire config set . exec allows developers to execute CLI tools and deploy allows apps to be deployed to dev, test, or prod environments.  Microsoft also redesigned the experience around its eventing APIs and added an interaction service that allows developers to create custom UX for getting user input. It supports standard text input, masked t...

African training program creates developers with cloud-native skills

With cloud native technologies becoming foundational for software development and deployment, and finding developers skilled in those areas a challenge, talent marketplace provider Andela and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation have partnered to create the Kubernetes African Developer Training Program that more than 5,600 Africans have completed. Andela and the CNCF are looking to train between 20,000 – 30,000 African technologists by 2027, skilled in everything required to create and use AI systems. The eight-week program is free, and those completing the training have the option to seek CNCF certification. (Of the 5,600 learners that participated in the training, 1157 have achieved official KCNA certification, according to Andela.) “Kubernetes is a technology you can bet your career on. It’s the backbone of modern software, and increasingly, of scalable AI systems. The demand for this skill is exploding,” Carrol Chang, CEO of Andela, said in an announcement of the program. “At An...

Is Agile dead in the age of AI?

Since the 2001 Agile Manifesto, software development has thrived on principles like “individuals and interactions over processes,” continuous delivery, and embracing change. Over the following decades, we watched Agile disrupt heavyweight, documentation-driven SDLCs by enabling iterative value delivery and adaptive planning. Now, fast forward to 2025, and AI is drastically changing software development . Models like GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet can generate code in seconds, prompting a critical question for industry veterans: Is Agile still relevant? Or have AI-driven workflows reshaped what “agile” should be? AI Isn’t Killing Agile, It’s Reframing It Generative AI tools like Copilot and GPT-based systems have become essential in modern developer workflows, automating routine tasks and accelerating prototyping. For example, Robinhood’s engineering teams report that the majority of new code is generated by AI, with near-universal adoption among developers. However, this shift ha...

July 2025: All AI updates from the past month

Google’s new Opal tool allows users to create mini AI apps with no coding required Google has launched a new experimental AI tool designed for users who want to build apps entirely using AI prompts, with no coding needed at all. Opal  allows users to create mini AI apps by chaining together AI prompts, models, and tools, using natural language and visual editing. “Opal is a great tool to accelerate prototyping AI ideas and workflows, demonstrate a proof of concept with a functional app, build custom AI apps to boost your productivity at work, and more,” Google wrote in a  blog post . The tool consists of a visual editor to help creators see the workflows in their apps and connect different prompts together to build multi-step apps. It allows the user to describe the logic they want in the app and have Opal build the workflow for them. Users will be able to edit the generated workflow either in the visual editor or through additional prompts. Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite is now g...

Understanding the code modernization conundrum

Like many large enterprises, we must navigate the beauty and chaos of legacy code. In our case, decades of SQL procedures and business logic that underpin a platform capable of handling over 3 million concurrent users and hundreds of micro code deployments per week. It’s a complex machine. Touch one part, and you risk breaking 10 others. That’s why modernizing the codebase is both a technical challenge and a human one. It requires empathy, trust, and the ability to make informed guesses. Inside the Innovation Engine At bet365, the platform innovation function was established to provoke possibility. We’re a small, specialized team charged with exploring emerging and future technologies. Our aim is to identify where they can have the greatest impact, and help the wider organization understand how to use them meaningfully. We’re enablers and ambassadors for change. Our work spans everything from product development and cybersecurity to the future of the workforce. Our guiding model is ...

AI-Generated Code Poses Major Security Risks in Nearly Half of All Development Tasks, Veracode Research Reveals   

While AI is becoming better at generating that functional code, it is also enabling attackers to identify and exploit vulnerabilities in that code more quickly and effectively. This is making it easier for less-skilled programmers to attack the code, increasing the speed and sophistication of those attacks — creating a situation in which code vulnerabilities are increasing even as the ability to exploit them is becoming easier, according to new research from application risk management software provider Veracode. AI-generated code introduced security vulnerabilities in 45% of 80 curated coding tasks across more than 100 LLMs, according to the 2025 GenAI Code Security Report . The research also found that GenAI models chose an insecure method to write code over a secure method 45% of the time. So, even though AI can create code that is functional and syntaactically correct, the report reveals that security performance has not kept pace. “The rise of vibe coding, where developers rely ...

Stack Overflow: Developers’ trust in AI outputs is worsening year over year

More and more developers are adopting AI, but the trust they have in its outputs is getting worse and worse over the years. This is according to Stack Overflow’s 2025 Developer Survey, which gathered responses from 49,000 developers across 177 countries. This year, 84% of respondents say they are using or plan to use AI tools for development (up from 76% last year), but 46% say they don’t trust the output of those AI tools (up from 31% last year). More specifically, 75.3% said they don’t trust AI-generated answers, 61.7% had ethical or security concerns about AI-generated code, and 61.3% said they want to be able to fully understand their code. “The growing lack of trust in AI tools stood out to us as the key data point in this year’s survey, especially given the increased pace of growth and adoption of these AI tools. AI is a powerful tool, but it has significant risks of misinformation or can lack complexity or relevance,” said Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of Stack Overflow.  ...

Google’s new Opal tool allows users to create mini AI apps with no coding required

Google has launched a new experimental AI tool designed for users who want to build apps entirely using AI prompts, with no coding needed at all. Opal allows users to create mini AI apps by chaining together AI prompts, models, and tools, using natural language and visual editing.  “Opal is a great tool to accelerate prototyping AI ideas and workflows, demonstrate a proof of concept with a functional app, build custom AI apps to boost your productivity at work, and more,” Google wrote in a blog post .  The tool consists of a visual editor to help creators see the workflows in their apps and connect different prompts together to build multi-step apps. It allows the user to describe the logic they want in the app and have Opal build the workflow for them. Users will be able to edit the generated workflow either in the visual editor or through additional prompts.  Once a user is happy with their app, they will be able to easily share it with others, Google explained....