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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...

Microsoft announces general availability of Azure DevOps local MCP Server  The MCP server acts as an intermediary between AI assistants and the Azure DevOps organization. It can help inject context from Azure DevOps, like work items, pull requests, and test plans. By adding this context to prompts, the LLM can provide more relevant answers that are tailored to the users Azure DevOps project. According to Microsoft, it supports most of the main areas of Azure DevOps, including work items, wiki, repos, search, and test plans. Because it is local and not a remote MCP Server, it runs inside the network or local development environment, ensuring that private data doesn’t leave the system. Google introduces Coral NPU, Veo 3.1 in Gemini API, and interactive commands in Gemini CLI Google this week announced that the latest version of its image generation model Veo is now available in the Gemini API. Veo 3.1 can generate richer native audio, has an improved understanding of cinematic ...

Oracle has announced the launch of a new marketplace to help customers find and deploy validated AI agents that can be used within Oracle Fusion Applications, its suite of cloud-based modular business applications. The AI Agent Marketplace includes agent templates built by Oracle partners to help with various business processes, including finance, HR, supply chain, and customer experience. For example, IBM created a Smart Sales Order Entry Assistant agent to help cut down on manual order entry errors and accelerate order capture, Box offers a Data Extraction agent for the Oracle Digital Assistant that extracts metadata or structured content from documents stored in Box, and Stripe built an Infosys Invoice Collection AI that can help with payment processing and reminder. According to Oracle, agents can be deployed in one-click using natural language, eliminating the need for complex integration code. The agents are also designed as templates, allowing customers to modify them to mee...

Anthropic has announced the release of Claude Haiku 4.5, which provides similar coding performance to Claude Sonnet 4, but is twice as fast and one-third as expensive. This follows the release of Claude Sonnet 4.5 two weeks ago, which Anthropic claimed as “the best coding model in the world” when it was announced. Claude Haiku 4.5 outperforms Sonnet 4 on SWE-bench, but falls second behind Sonnet 4.5. “Claude Sonnet 4.5, released two weeks ago, remains our frontier model and the best coding model in the world. Claude Haiku 4.5 gives users a new option for when they want near-frontier performance with much greater cost-efficiency,” Anthropic wrote in a post . The company explained that these two models can be used together to get the best of each, such as using Sonnet 4.5 to break down a complex problem into multiple steps and then having multiple Haiku 4.5 instances working together to execute those subtasks in parallel. According to Anthropic, Haiku 4.5 excels at real-time, low-la...

Twilio today announced new features to help companies create and maintain customer experiences that are based on trusted data. According to Twilio, having access to accurate and reliable data is crucial for customer engagement, but data teams often face delay and missed opportunities as a result of an inability to trace, diagnose and resolve data issues. Additionally, these teams often have to work across multiple altering mechanisms, which can lead to important alerts getting missed, also resulting in downtime or other reputational damage. New observability and alerting capabilities are designed to help address those challenges and eliminate the time-consuming work of tracking down issues in data. The new Granular Observability capability provides access details for each event ID to make it easier to trace, diagnose, and resolve issues, while the new Altering Hub provides a centralized location for configuring, viewing, and managing alerts. The company also updated its APIs to mak...

During its API Summit today, Kong announced several new features to help improve the way developers manage their APIs. It announced that Kong Event Gateway will be added to Kong Konnect later this quarter. Kong Event Gateway was first introduced earlier this year, and it provides a unified workspace for building, governing, securing, exposing, and publishing Kafka data like it was an API. Product teams can expose Kafka as HTTP APIs or as native Kafka services that communicate over the Kafka protocol. According to the company, the platform helps reduce the infrastructure burdens associated with running Kafka. It also enables self-service access for agents and LLMs, allows teams to move event-driven architecture workloads to the cloud by offering a centralized method for handling encrypted data across clients, and provides role-based access control and authorization. “With Event Gateway, enterprises can start to drive more ROI out of their event data through data productization and...

Software testing company BrowserStack announced a Visual Review Agent for its visual web testing platform Percy. “Visual testing has reached a point where the question is no longer ‘why’ but ‘how to make it scalable?'” Ritesh Arora, CEO and co-founder at BrowserStack “The Visual Review Agent brings AI into the heart of visual testing, cutting through noise and surfacing what matters.” According to BrowserStack, the Visual Review Agent provides an AI-generated summary of each visual change. The agent uses AI to filter out minor pixel shifts and only flags meaningful changes, not minor changes like font resizes, margin shifts, or button alignment. “These noisy false positives force teams to waste time reviewing irrelevant changes instead of focusing on what actually matters,” the company explained in a demo . Testers will have the option to hide changes that are similar to the current one, and can set review rules if they only want to focus on specific visual changes. The agent...