Best Programming Master

For product and engineering teams, building a competitive moat is one of the most critical aspects of your work. But in the age of AI, that moat can evaporate overnight. When AI upends your product roadmap, you might realize that you need to start from scratch. Your original solution is no longer viable, so you need to build a new, AI-native product that can compete over the long term in the new technology environment. This realization puts organizations in a tough position, particularly if they have contractual obligations with their existing customers. How do you balance your engineering resources to pursue AI innovation while also supporting your existing product? How do you decide when to pull the plug and go all in on an AI solution? One year ago, my engineering team faced this exact challenge. We knew that we needed to build a new AI product to replace our existing platform, but we also had to maintain our commitments to a customer base to maintain our existing revenue. Here’...

Amazon is hosting its annual user conference, re:Invent, this week in Las Vegas. The event brings together AWS practitioners, but also offers Amazon and its partners an opportunity to announce updates across the AWS ecosystem. Here are some of the highlights: Custom transformations in AWS Transform AWS Transform , a platform that can be used to modernize .NET applications, VMware systems, and mainframes, was updated with the ability to create custom transformations for organization-specific modernization tasks. Additionally, Amazon added pre-built transformations for a variety of common patterns, such as those found in Java, Node.js, and Python upgrades. The company also added new capabilities for mainframe and VMware modernization, as well as a composability initiative for partners to integrate their own tools, agents, and knowledge bases to create custom workflows in AWS Transform for their customers. Amazon Nova Forge This new platform allows developers to build their own front...

Typemock has released the latest version of its .NET unit testing mocking tool, Isolator , adding support for .NET 10 and the Visual Studio 2026 Insiders build. According to the company, this expanded support enables developers to utilize their existing test suites while leveraging the latest .NET features. “Our goal with Isolator 9.4 was to remove friction and give developers complete confidence as they adopt the next generation of .NET without rewriting existing tests or bending their architecture just to make it ‘testable,’” said Eli Lopian, CEO of Typemock. Another key update in Isolator 9.4 is that SmartRunner now automatically aligns to the same .NET runtime as the test project. SmartRunner is a feature that lets developers know which tests are impacted by changes, so that they can choose to only run those that are relevant and necessary. The internal architecture selection logic was also improved to create a predictable experience in projects that leverage both x86 and x64 c...

For years, the “year of the Linux desktop” has been a running joke, and the “Windows on ARM” revolution has been a perpetual promise—always just around the corner, yet never quite arriving. But while Microsoft and Qualcomm have been locked in a clumsy dance to force the square peg of x86 legacy Windows into the round hole of ARM architecture, a far more dangerous contender has been waiting in the wings. The coming “Android PC” (rumored to be codenamed “Aluminum”) represents a seismic shift in personal computing. For Qualcomm, this isn’t just another product line; it is the escape hatch from the shackles of Microsoft’s legacy debt. But as with all things Google, the hardware is only as good as the company’s famously fickle attention span allows it to be. The Native Advantage: Why Android Beats Windows for Qualcomm The fundamental flaw of the “AI PC” push with Windows on ARM is friction. Despite Microsoft’s heroic engineering efforts with the PRISM emulator, Windows on Snapdragon is ...

Parasoft has announced that the latest releases of its test automation solutions C/C++test and C/C++test CT are now available. First previewed at embedded world North America last month, the updates include agentic AI workflows, static analysis for CUDA C/C++, and improved support for GoogleTest. Parasoft’s MCP server allows AI agents to be connected to C/C++test to automatically fix violations, optimize rule sets, and generate documentation. “This is what AI developers actually want—one that acts as a true partner,” said Igor Kirilenko, chief product officer at Parasoft. “By automating the heavy lifting, it frees up your experts to focus on more complex challenges, turning quality and compliance from a burden into their greatest advantage.” Next, static analysis for NVIDIA’s CUDA platform allows for better safety and security enforcement for GPU-accelerated and AI-driven applications. Developers will now be able to apply industry standards to both their CPU and GPU environments, ...

As this year comes to a close, many experts have begun to look ahead to next year. Here are several predictions for how companies will manage security in 2026. Suja Viswesan, vice president of technology at IBM Shadow agents will accelerate data exposure faster than we can detect it: As autonomous AI agents begin to operate independently across enterprise environments, often outside sanctioned workflows, they access sensitive data with minimal human oversight. These agents replicate and evolve without leaving clear audit trails or conforming to legacy security frameworks. They move faster than conventional monitoring can follow. This creates a new exposure problem: businesses will know data was exposed but won’t know which agents moved it, where it went, or why. Systems that can trace agent data access across machine-to-machine interactions will become essential.”   Gabrielle Hempel, security operations strategist at Exabeam In 2026, as AI systems face more legal scrutiny and...

Several new updates make their way into the MCP specification It has been one year since Anthropic first open sourced Model Context Protocol (MCP), and to celebrate this anniversary a new version of the specification is being released . “It’s hard to imagine that a little open-source experiment, a protocol to provide context to models, became the de-facto standard for this very scenario in less than twelve months,” the MCP Core Maintainers wrote in a blog post . The latest release includes support for task-based workflows (experimental). According to the maintainers, tasks provide a new type of abstraction for tracking the work an MCP server performs. It enables several new capabilities, such as active polling to check the status of ongoing work anytime and result retrieval to see results of completed tasks. Tasks also support many different states including working , input_required , completed , failed , and cancelled . Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.5 with improvements to comp...

It has been one year since Anthropic first open sourced Model Context Protocol (MCP), and to celebrate this anniversary a new version of the specification is being released. “It’s hard to imagine that a little open-source experiment, a protocol to provide context to models, became the de-facto standard for this very scenario in less than twelve months,” the MCP Core Maintainers wrote in a blog post . The latest release includes support for task-based workflows (experimental). According to the maintainers, tasks provide a new type of abstraction for tracking the work an MCP server performs. It enables several new capabilities, such as active polling to check the status of ongoing work anytime and result retrieval to see results of completed tasks. Tasks also support many different states including working , input_required , completed , failed , and cancelled . Some use cases that tasks would be helpful for include healthcare data analysis where hundreds of thousands of data points a...

Anthropic has released the latest version of its largest Claude model, Opus. Claude Opus 4.5 is better at handling complex reasoning than previous Claude models and makes improvements across agentic tool use, computer use, novel problem solving, and more. The company says early testers of the new model claim that it handles ambiguity better and reasons over tradeoffs without needing human intervention. “They told us that, when pointed at a complex, multi-system bug, Opus 4.5 figures out the fix. They said that tasks that were near-impossible for Sonnet 4.5 just a few weeks ago are now within reach. Overall, our testers told us that Opus 4.5 just ‘gets it,’” Anthropic wrote in a post . This release also coincides with a new effort parameter being introduced in the Claude API, allowing developers to decide how much effort Claude should spend on a problem. According to Anthropic, Opus 4.5 uses significantly fewer tokens than its predecessors to solve problems, even at its highest effort...

A new malicious campaign linked to the Shai-Hulud worm is making its way throughout the npm ecosystem. According to findings from Wiz , over 25,000 npm packages have been compromised and over 350 users have been impacted. Shai-Hulud was a worm that infected the npm registry back in September , and now a new worm spelled as Sha1-Hulud is appearing in the ecosystem again, though it is unclear at the time of writing whether the two worms were made by the same threat actor. Wiz and Aikido researchers have confirmed that Sha1-Hulud was uploaded to the npm ecosystem between November 21st and 23rd. They also say that projects from Zapier, ENS Domains, PostHog, and Postman were some of the ones that were trojanized, and newly compromised packages are still being discovered. Like Shai-Hulud, this new malware also steals developer secrets, though Garrett Calpouzos, principal security researcher at Sonatype, explained that the mechanism is slightly different, with two files instead of one. “Th...

The adoption of AI in enterprise organizations is causing an evolution in the practice of strategic portfolio management (SPM). The changes reshaping this — lean portfolio management, shorter application delivery cycles and the rise of agentic AI — are redefining how organizations align investment with execution. Many organizations that have brought AI into their operations have seen few tangible results to drive their businesses. In 2026, this will require organizations to apply SPM principles to their own AI investments—managing costs and understanding value. SPM, according to Jean-Louis Vignaud, senior director and head of ValueOps by Broadcom, will be elevated to a CEO-level concern, directly impacting enterprise strategy. “As AI is being used, the delivery cycle from idea to realization is shortening, and that means the annual operating plan is becoming a thing of the past,” he said. “You cannot plan 12 months ahead. You need to be way more reactive. Because, you know, everythin...

The latest version of the web framework Angular is now available, with new features like Signal Forms (experimental), Angular Aria (preview), and updates to the Angular MCP Server. “With the release of v21, Angular is an even greater partner for your daily adventures — giving you the stability of the Angular framework while enabling you to build great AI-powered applications that are scalable and accessible for everyone,” Jens Kuehlers, technical program manager for Angular, and Mark “Techson” Thompson, staff developer relations engineer for Angular, wrote in a blog post . Signal Forms is a library that allows developers to manage form state using signals. With this library, the form model is defined by a signal which syncs to the form fields that are bound to it, ensuring full type-safety for accessing form fields. Common validation patterns, like email validation or regular expression matching, come built in, and developers can also create their own custom validations. Angular Ari...

The first wave of AI adoption in software development was about productivity. For the past few years, AI has felt like a magic trick for software developers: We ask a question, and seemingly perfect code appears. The productivity gains are undeniable, and a generation of developers is now growing up with an AI assistant as their constant companion. This is a huge leap forward in the software development world, and it’s here to stay. The next — and far more critical — wave will be about managing risk. While developers have embraced large language models (LLMs) for their remarkable ability to solve coding challenges, it’s time for a conversation about the quality, security, and long-term cost of the code these models produce. The challenge is no longer about getting AI to write code that works. It’s about ensuring AI writes code that lasts. And so far, the time spent by software developers in dealing with the quality and risk issues spawned by LLMs has not made developers ...

ChatGPT captured the world’s imagination, but it may have also trapped it. The chatbot interface—with its familiar conversational format—made AI accessible to millions, demonstrating the remarkable capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in a package that felt natural and inviting. Yet this very success has created a misconception: that AI equals chatbots, and that every application needs a chat window to be AI-powered. The reality is more nuanced. ChatGPT succeeded not just because of its underlying technology, but because it brilliantly matched interface to capability. By packaging AI in a conversational format, OpenAI created a product where errors were acceptable—even expected. Users could correct misunderstandings, refine prompts, and iterate toward better answers. The chatbot became the perfect vehicle for technology that was inherently probabilistic and occasionally wrong. But what works for general-purpose exploration doesn’t translate to domain-specific business applica...

It seems in the great, exhilarating, terrifying race to take advantage of agentic AI technology, a lot of us are flooring it, desperate to overtake competitors, while forgetting there are several hairpin turns in the distance requiring strategic navigation, lest we run out of talent in the pursuit of ambition and wipe out entirely.  One of the major “hairpins” for us to overcome is security, and it feels like cyber professionals have been waving their arms and shouting “watch out!” for the better part of a year. And with good reason: On Friday, the 14th of November, Anthropic, a world-renowned LLM vendor made famous by its popular Claude Code tool, released an eye-opening paper on a cyber incident they observed in September 2025 that targeted large tech companies, financial institutions, chemical manufacturing companies, and government agencies. This was no garden-variety breach, it was an early holiday gift for threat actors seeking real-world proof that AI “double agents” coul...