Best Programming Master

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...

When the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act (EU AI Act) came into effect in 2024, it marked the world’s first comprehensive regulatory framework for AI. The law introduced risk-based obligations—ranging from minimal to unacceptable—and codified requirements around transparency, accountability, and testing. But more than a legal milestone, it crystallized a broader debate: who is responsible when AI systems cause harm? The EU framework sends a clear signal: responsibility cannot be outsourced. Whether an AI system is developed by a global model provider or embedded in a narrow enterprise workflow, accountability extends across the ecosystem. Most organizations now recognize distinct layers in the AI value chain: Model providers , who train and distribute the core LLMs Platform providers , who package models into usable products System integrators and enterprises , who build and deploy applications Each layer carries distinct—but overlapping—responsibilities. Model provi...

Moderne, a company that provides solutions to help modernize code, announced that its Lossless Semantic Tree (LST) code model now supports JavaScript and TypeScript. LST is a format-preserving code model that captures syntax, types, symbols, dependencies, control and data flow, and whitespace. With today’s announcement, LST can now model Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, and common Infrastructure-as-Code formats. According to Moderne, this support is coming at a time when many organizations are needing to deal with JavaScript upgrades, like moving from Node.js 20, which is now deprecated on GitHub Actions, to Node 24. Several util type-checking methods have been deprecated since Node.js 22, like util.isArray() , util.isBoolean() , and util.isDate() . To upgrade to Node 24, developers would need to track down every instance of these methods and replace them with the modern equivalent. “Spread across thousands of repositories, this becomes slow, error-prone, and nearly impossible to tr...

A recent CIO article revealed a startling reality:  31% of employees admit to sabotaging their company’s generative AI strategy.  That’s nearly one in three workers actively slowing down, blocking, or undermining progress. Now layer in the math: most AI initiatives involve dozens of employees. That means statistically, almost  every project or proof-of-concept is being impacted by one or more saboteurs.  No wonder MIT recently found that more than 80% of corporate AI initiatives are failing to deliver meaningful ROI. It’s not always the technology—it’s the culture. At Appvance, we’ve seen this firsthand in proof-of-concept projects. AIQ generates a thousand test scripts in under an hour—something that might take a traditional QA team weeks or months. For some testers, this is exhilarating: finally, coverage at a scale that humans alone could never achieve. For others, it’s terrifying. Instead of leaning in, they resist, delay, or undermine the effort—hoping to prot...

Salesforce—ahead of its Dreamforce 2025 conference this week—announced the general availability of Agentforce 360 , its agentic AI platform. Agentforce was first introduced last October, and over the last year, the company has added several new capabilities to the platform, such as the ability to embed agents in workflows and improved interoperability and governance. “These milestones have led to Agentforce 360, which transforms Salesforce beyond CRM — where agents don’t just serve customers, but also empower employees, streamline operations, and collaborate with other agents,” Salesforce wrote in an announcement . Agentforce 360 includes the Agentforce Builder, a development platform for building, testing, and deploying agents using natural language. It includes a unified workspace for all these phases of the development process, the ability to switch between a doc-like editor and low-code canvas, real-time previews and live debugging, and enterprise-grade governance. Agentforce B...

Amazon launches Quick Suite to provide agentic AI across applications and AWS services Amazon Quick Suite allows users to ask questions, conduct deep research, analyze and visualize data, and create automations. It can connect to internal repositories, like wikis or intranet, and AWS services. Amazon also offers 50+ built-in connectors to applications like Adobe Analytics, SharePoint, Snowflake, Google Drive, OneDrive, Outlook, ServiceNow, and Databricks, as well as support for over 1,000+ apps via connecting to their MCP servers. This deep connection across the enterprise enables Quick Sight to analyze data across all of a company’s systems and create complex business workflows across multiple applications and departments. “Unlike traditional business intelligence tools that work only with databases and data warehouses, Quick Sight’s agentic experience analyzes all forms of data across all your systems and apps, including your documents,” Amazon wrote in a blog post . Google unve...

In February 2025, Andrej Karpathy coined the term “vibe coding” with a tweet that instantly resonated across the developer community. The idea was simple yet powerful: instead of writing code line-by-line, you describe what you want in natural language, and an AI model scaffolds the entire solution. No formal specs, no boilerplate grind, just vibes. Vibe coding quickly gained traction because it removed the friction from starting a project. In minutes, developers could go from a vague product idea to a working prototype. It wasn’t just about speed, it was about fluid creativity . Teams could explore ideas without committing weeks of engineering time. The viral demo, like the one Satya Nadella did and various experiments, reinforced the feeling that AI-assisted development wasn’t just a curiosity; it was a glimpse into the future of software creation. But even in those early days, there was an unspoken reality: while AI could “vibe” out an MVP, the leap from prototype to production...

LaunchDarkly , the comprehensive feature management platform, today unveiled key new AI capabilities and integrations that let developers ship software at even higher velocity while keeping risks at bay. These updates further the company’s vision for Self-Healing Software that allows engineers to focus on delivering amazing user experiences instead of anxiously awaiting late-night calls to fix bugs and outages. Pressure has been mounting on developers to ship code faster and faster as organizations have moved from yearly to seasonal to agile deployments. And now, the rise of AI-assisted ‘vibe coding’ is accelerating that pace even more, increasing the volume of code shipped – and with it, the risk of shipping buggy software. Traditional Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools, while still essential for infra and system-wide monitoring, were never built to tie the performance of the features being shipped to the underlying observability data. That has left a critical gap in obse...

Redis today announced the acquisition of Featureform , a powerful framework for managing, defining, and orchestrating structured data signals. The acquisition helps Redis solve one of the most critical challenges developers face with production AI: getting structured data into models quickly, reliably, and with full observability. AI agents need more than LLMs—they depend on real-time data, past interactions, and knowledge bases to deliver accurate results. Getting that context to models at the right time remains a persistent challenge in deploying AI apps and agents into production, and delivering an exceptional experience to users once in production. Redis makes it simple by serving as the real-time data platform developers trust to power AI agents with memory, knowledge, and structured data—now supercharged by the integration of Featureform. Featureform will become a part of Redis’ feature store solution, complementing the fastest benchmarked vector database powered by Redis Quer...