Influencing the agents
jawad
Ever since Stephen O’Grady’s The New Kingmakers, we’ve all been trying to figure out how to appeal to developers. Now we’re going to have to figure out how to appeal…
General
Cursor removes malicious Claude Code extension after SSH backdoor attempt
A malicious version of Anthropic’s Claude Code extension distributed through the Cursor marketplace attempted to install a persistent Secure Shell (SSH) backdoor on developers’ machines, potentially giving attackers remote access…
How fixing our data infrastructure before it broke us gave back 6,200 engineering hours
Just about every CTO at a growth-stage company that I know is carrying an infrastructure problem they are quietly deciding not to look at. The system works, so the problem…
Are AI certifications still worth it? What changed in 2026
Same question, a different answer Earlier this year, in Are AI certifications worth the investment?, I argued that AI certifications ranked among the highest-return investments an IT professional could make.…
Seven egregious failures of modern web tech
The modern web is a miracle of engineering, but its history is littered with brilliant concepts that flamed out in execution. For every innovation that stuck the landing, there is…
IBM’s Bob wants to move in: Agent available for on-prem deployment
Bob, IBM’s agentic software development platform is now available to run on premises and in private clouds, sovereign clouds, and air-gapped environments to give users more control over their data.…
AI is less dangerous than humans
Over the past few weeks, people have been pushing a stack of reports at me as evidence that AI is dangerous to humanity. The OpenAI incident disclosures, the METR and…
AI could boost software engineer productivity by 32.6%
Tools such as Anthropic Claude Code or OpenAI Codex have changed the face of software development, and all the signs are that this investment is set to increase further. But…
Microsoft, Google back Apache Ossie to make enterprise data and AI platforms more interoperable
Microsoft and Google are joining a project to create an open specification for exchanging semantic models across data, analytics, and AI platforms. The project already has the backing of over…
Google makes Gemini 4 AI model available to a trusted few
Google has unveiled a new frontier AI model after months of delay. Gemini 4 Argon is designed to handle complex, long-horizon workloads spanning software engineering, enterprise knowledge work such as…