From the archive
AI tools help people write software, search information, create content and automate parts of their work. Find news on developer tools, coding assistants, open-source projects and software for running AI locally. Our coverage explains what each tool does, how access and pricing work, and which practical limits or security considerations matter before you add it to a workflow.
Lead story
A study from Apple and EPFL found that, under equal time budgets, elaborate agent harnesses did not outperform a minimal coding-agent setup using the same frontier model. The result puts a useful question to AI developers: how much of an agent’s performance comes from its scaffolding, and how…
Read the report & discussion ↗OpenText Watch
OpenText’s Fortify Agent Skills give coding agents access to security findings and defined workflows, so they can prepare fixes with more context than source code alone. The important boundary: an agent can propose the repair without becoming the authority that signs it off. For teams already letting agents…
Watch Desk
Universities adopting AI assistants may be outsourcing more than computing, argues Hugging Face community writer Vasileios Stergiou: they may also be handing a private company influence over how students encounter difficult questions. His proposed alternative is to run open-weight models on infrastructure the institution controls, and make the…
NVIDIA Watch
NVIDIA has announced a reference design for securing autonomous AI agents, pairing a sandboxed runtime with a separate hardware watchdog, according to Moor Insights & Strategy. The design shifts some safety controls out of the model itself and into the systems that run it, a practical change for…
Mistral AI Watch
Mistral is expanding its Canadian business, planning offices in Montreal and Toronto while hiring researchers, developers and customer-facing engineers. The move shows how the French AI company is turning interest in sovereign AI into a push to build and customise systems for local organisations, though most of its…
Watch Desk
Cognition is betting that owning the model and infrastructure gives it an edge in AI coding, while Factory is betting that flexibility across models and deployment setups is the better route. A new comparison says the two approaches are now playing out in enterprise software engineering, with very…
Watch Desk
When an AI model returns unusable output, a customer may pay for the attempt and for a retry. Bharath Koneti argues that inference bills need a second kind of receipt: one connecting what an application asked for, what arrived and what the provider charged.
Watch Desk
Python’s 2026 Language Summit produced proposals ranging from Rust components in CPython to a revised garbage collector and a new standard-library namespace. The reports offer a useful look at the engineering choices that could shape Python’s performance, safety and maintenance, though these are proposals and discussions, not changes…
Microsoft AI Watch
Wazari.ai says it built its Azure-based agent Ezra a memory system that people can inspect and change, with human review for proposed skills and checks for decisions whose assumptions have changed. It is a practical answer to a problem that arrives once an agent is expected to remember…
Watch Desk
Building an AI agent that can use real services means solving more than login: teams must manage whose account it acts on, what it may access and how risky actions are approved. A Firecrawl guide compares nine authentication platforms and separates the job into four distinct problems, a…
Anthropic Watch
Anthropic’s Claude Code 2.1.286 brings a sizeable batch of fixes and workflow changes, including stronger redaction of secrets in logs and transcripts. The update also changes how remote-control sessions respond when an organisation switches the feature off, and how background agents behave in the VS Code extension.
