OpenAI announced Thursday that it has reached an agreement to acquire Astral, the startup behind some of Python community’s most popular open-source developer tools. The acquisition marks further escalation in the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted development market, which has led to a coding war between OpenAI and its primary rivals, including Anthropic and the AI-native code editor Cursor. In integrating Astral’s high-performance tooling into its Codex platform, OpenAI intends to solidify its ecosystem as the primary destination for software engineers. Financial terms were not disclosed, but under the deal Astral’s team is expected to join OpenAI to enhance Codex,…
Author: drweb
My latest book, Vibe Coding Video Games with Python, is now available as an eBook. The paperback will be coming soon, hopefully by mid-February at the latest. The book is around 183 pages in length and is 6×9” in size. In this book, you will learn how to use artificial intelligence to create mini-games. You will attempt to recreate the look and feel of various classic video games. The intention is not to violate copyright or anything of the sort, but instead to learn the limitations and the power of AI. Instead, you will simply be learning about whether or not you…
Secure Code Warrior (SCW) this week added an artificial intelligence (AI) agent that both identifies code generated by an AI coding tool and automatically applies the appropriate governance policies. Company CEO Pieter Danhieux said the SCW Trust Agent makes it possible for DevSecOps teams to use AI to verify which AI models influenced specific commits, correlate that influence to vulnerability exposure, and take corrective action before insecure code is added to a production environment. DevSecOps teams can also use the AI agent to discover any Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that might have been deployed without permission. Finally, SCW benchmark…
Python has had type hinting support since Python 3.5, over TEN years ago! However, Python’s type annotations have changed repeatedly over the years. In Python Typing: Type Checking for Python Programmers, you will learn all you need to know to add type hints to your Python applications effectively. You will also learn how to use Python type checkers, configure them, and set them up in pre-commit or GitHub Actions. This knowledge will give you the power to check your code and your team’s code automatically before merging, hopefully catching defects before they make it into your products. Support the Book! You…
This article explains how to use the new Java features provided within Project Leyden to speed up Spring Boot application startup. Project Leyden is an OpenJDK initiative focused on making Java applications start faster, warm up quicker, and use less memory. It builds on CDS (Class Data Sharing) and Ahead-of-Time optimizations to move selected computations out of runtime and perform them earlier, reducing work during application startup and execution. It is currently in the experimental phase. So, it is not a part of the standard JDK distribution, and you should definitely not try it in production. To use it, you…
Textual is a great Python user interface package. Textual lets you create a GUI-like interface in your terminal. You can use many different widgets in Textual. However, the widget you will be focusing on in this tutorial is the humble checkbox. Checkboxes are used for Boolean choices. They return a True if checked and a False if unchecked. You can use a checkbox as a clear visual cue to indicate whether one or more options are enabled or disabled. In this tutorial, you will learn the following: How to create a standard checkbox How to customize the checkbox widget Let’s…
Checkmarx this week revamped its DevSecOps platform to include an orchestration framework for managing tasks assigned to artificial intelligence (AI) agents. Additionally, the company has added two additional artificial intelligence (AI) agents trained to triage vulnerabilities and remediate them using code it generates for review while at the same time adding an ability to discover AI software assets, including models, agents, datasets, prompts and AI bill of materials (AI-BOM) components, to make it simpler to consistently enforce policies. Finally, Checkmarx has also infused its static application security testing (SAST) and dynamic application security testing (DAST) tools with AI capabilities to…
Stripe built Minions. Ramp built Inspect. Coinbase built Cloudbot. Three engineering organizations, working independently, arrived at similar architectural decisions for their internal AI coding agents. LangChain noticed the convergence and open-sourced the pattern. Open SWE, released March 17, is an open-source framework built on LangChain’s Deep Agents and LangGraph that provides the core architectural components for internal coding agents. The MIT-licensed project isn’t trying to be another AI coding assistant. It’s a customizable foundation for organizations that want to build their own — the way Stripe, Ramp and Coinbase already have. The Convergence What caught LangChain’s attention was that these…
If you do any kind of local web development on Linux, you have almost certainly run into the browser warning that says “Your connection is not private” while testing your own app on localhost. It is not a real security threat, you know that, but it is annoying, and more importantly, it creates a problem when you need to test features that browsers restrict to secure origins, such as service workers, geolocation, clipboard access, camera and microphone permissions, and HTTP/2. The standard workaround is to set up a self-signed certificate manually, which involves generating a CA, signing a certificate, trusting…
Arcjet today added an ability to detect and block risky prompts before they are shared with a large language model (LLM) embedded within an application. The Arcjet AI prompt injection protection capability is based on an LLM that the company has been specifically training to detect patterns indicative of risky prompts that can then be blocked using a runtime policy engine built using WebAssembly (Wasm). That approach makes it simpler to embed the Arcjet policy engine into application code and apply it to endpoints built with JavaScript, Python or frameworks such as the Vercel AI software development kit (SDK) or…