I wrote about learning today for the editorial: I Can’t Make You Learn. I sure hope you want to learn. It’s been great for my career and it will help yours.Join me this September in San Diego (register). I used to live there (Carlsbad) and it’s a beautiful, wonderful part of California to visit. VS Live comes to San Diego, and I’m honored to be speaking this year. Visual Studio Live! (VSLive!) San Diego 2026 is at the Bahia Resort Hotel, September 14–18, 2026 in San Diego, CA. It’s five days of immersive developer training right on Mission Bay. I…
Author: drweb
A number on the dashboard gets questioned in a meeting. Nobody can prove who is right, and within ten minutes a room full of expensive people is arguing about a spreadsheet instead of making a decision. I have sat in that room. So have you. The coffee goes cold, the meeting runs long, and everyone leaves agreeing on exactly one thing: the dashboard is wrong. What nobody says is which problem they are looking at, because most teams never learned the difference between data quality, data reliability, and data observability.“The dashboard is wrong” is not a diagnosis. It is a…
SpaceXAI has shipped Grok 4.5, the first model it built jointly with Cursor since acquiring the AI coding platform, and the pitch is squarely aimed at engineering teams watching their token spend. Grok 4.5 is built to excel at coding, agentic tasks, and knowledge work, and it’s the strongest model SpaceXAI has released so far. It’s also, according to Cursor’s own announcement, the first model the company has built beyond software engineering.That broader scope shows up in the training approach. Cursor previously built Composer 2.5 as a coding specialist. For Grok 4.5, the team deliberately broadened the training mix to…
IBM and Red Hat this week revealed that Lightwell Network, a catalog of more than 6,500 application-layer dependencies that drives an automated vulnerability remediation service, is now generally available.At the same time, the Lightwell Clearinghouse Premier service, through which application development teams can both access validated patches and coordinate remediation efforts, is now available to a limited number of organizations.Ben Breard, a senior principal product manager at Red Hat, said collectively these two offerings will make it simpler for organizations to address 30 years of technical debt that is now being exposed by artificial intelligence (AI) models that make it…
The business case for smart contracts is building fast. Major financial institutions are using programmable, code-based agreements to underpin financial workflows, supply chain operations, and tokenization initiatives. Developers are being asked to prove the value.But there’s a problem most organizations don’t fully see until they’re already stuck: privacy.Public blockchains are transparent by design. Every transaction is visible. That’s the feature that makes them trustworthy—and the reason enterprises can’t simply deploy business logic on one without first addressing confidentiality. If your competitors can see your contract terms, you don’t have a business case. You have a liability.“B2B transactions operate with a…
If your Bash prompt still feels like it belongs in 2005, with no syntax highlighting, no fuzzy history search, and just a blinking cursor, Flyline can modernize it in about 30 seconds. I’ve used Readline for as long as I’ve used Bash, which is most of my adult life. It always worked, so I never really thought about replacing it. That changed when a colleague shared his terminal during a screen-sharing session. I noticed his shell highlighted a broken pipe in red before he even pressed Enter, and he could fuzzy-search through his command history as easily as searching messages…
Senior Native IOS & Laravel Developer
A security flaw found in six popular AI coding agents can let attackers abuse a decades-old feature in Unix to trick an AI agent into giving them control of a developer’s system.Researchers with Google-owned Wiz said the vulnerability, dubbed “GhostApproval,” relies on symbolic links – or symlinks – a file system feature that has been a security problem for years and one in which a file path secretly points to another. Writing to the symlink actually means writing to the target rather than the actual intended file.Wiz found that the same technique – which over the years has been exploited…
If you run multiple AI coding agents at the same time, you’ve probably faced this problem: too many terminal tabs, no clear way to know which agent is waiting for your input, and constantly switching between tabs just to check their status. A few months ago, I started running Claude Code in one terminal and Codex in another, and within a week, I had five tabs open. Some were idle and waiting for me, but I couldn’t tell which ones without opening each tab individually. I tried using tmux status bars with custom scripts to track idle panes, and it…
Infrastructure reliability has always been central to enterprise success, yet traditional automation methods often fall short in handling complex, dynamic environments. With the rise of large language models (LLMs), a new paradigm of cognitive automation is emerging — where intelligent agents help infrastructure not only detect failures but also recommend or implement remediations in real-time. This article explores how integrating LLMs with Ansible creates a practical foundation for self-healing infrastructure, especially in mission-critical middleware environments such as Apache, WebLogic and Tomcat.The Case for Cognitive AutomationTraditional automation relies on rigid scripts that require constant human maintenance. While effective for routine tasks,…