Now that we’ve let this autonomous loop run wild, we’re going to step back and look at…
Author: drweb
Now that we’ve seen Ralph running locally, let’s move it onto a remote machine so we can…
GitHub’s AI assistant has been a fixture in developer IDEs for a few years now. But the company just made a significant move: It launched the GitHub Copilot app in technical preview, and this isn’t just another interface for writing code.The app is a GitHub-native desktop experience designed for agentic development — letting developers start from the work already in front of them, keep it isolated, steer it as it progresses, and land the change through pull request review. The key difference is that it runs entirely outside the IDE.A New Kind of Developer WorkflowFor years, developers have toggled between…
You’ve got a server refusing to start because something’s already sitting on port 8080, and you need to find what’s holding it and kill it without rebooting the whole machine. This happens constantly in real sysadmin work. You restart a service, get Address already in use, and now you’re digging through process lists trying to figure out what’s squatting on your port. The fix is straightforward once you know the right commands, and there are 3 solid ways to do it depending on what tools you have available on your system. Find What’s Running on a Port First Before you…
Now that we have played it safe with permissions, we are going to flip that around and…
Thank you to everyone who participated in T-SQL Tuesday #198! When I wrote the invitation post, I intentionally kept the prompt broad because change detection looks different depending on your source system, your infrastructure, your data volumes, and what you need to do with the changes once you have them. The responses covered SQL Server internals, Microsoft Fabric and Synapse, hashing strategies, metadata-driven frameworks, and Synapse workspace diffing with Python. Here’s a summary of each contribution.The RoundupRob Farley – Detecting Changes | LobsterPot SolutionsRob covered several approaches he’s used over the years and focused on Change Event Streaming (CES) in…
For years, IT and DevOps teams have wrestled with the same stubborn problem: how do you automate workflows in systems that were never built for automation? Legacy apps, vendor portals, and proprietary line-of-business platforms rarely offer APIs. That means someone, usually a human, ends up clicking through screens, entering data, and completing transactions by hand.Microsoft has a direct answer to that problem. Computer use in Microsoft Copilot Studio is now generally available, with expanded availability rolling out to all commercial geographies in Microsoft Power Platform.What Computer-Using Agents Actually DoThe simplest way to think about it: computer use gives an agent…
In this lesson, we’re taking our simple Ralph.js script and turning it into a polished CLI that…
Now that we have all the core pieces in place, let’s zoom out and see what this…
CI/CD was built around a comforting idea: Software should do tomorrow what it did today, assuming the inputs are the same.That assumption sits underneath a lot of modern DevOps. It is why we have build pipelines, test suites, artifact repositories, deployment gates, rollback strategies, infrastructure-as-code and all the other machinery that turned software delivery from an artisanal activity into something closer to an industrial process. We may not always get perfect repeatability, but the goal has been clear. Same source code. Same build process. Same tests. Same artifact. Same deployment path. Same expected result.Agentic AI makes a mess of that…