That mismatch worked, if uncomfortably, when contributing had friction. After all, you had to care enough to reproduce a bug, understand the codebase, and risk looking dumb. But AI agents are obliterating that friction (and have no problem with looking dumb). Even Mitchell Hashimoto, the founder of HashiCorp, is now considering closing external PRs to his open source projects, not because he's losing faith in open source, but because he's drowning in "slop PRs" generated by large language models and their AI agent henchmen.
Linux kernel version numbering became more predictable with the 3.x series, which saw the release of 19 kernels before ticking over to 4.0. Torvalds had some fun along the way, dubbing version 3.11 Linux for Workgroups, a reference to the name Microsoft gave Windows 3.11. He later pondered using version 4.0 as a special release dedicated to cleaning up bugs.
FOSDEM 2026 Amid growing interest in digital sovereignty and getting data out of the corporate cloud and into organizations' ownership, the Matrix open communication protocol is thriving. The project was co-founded by Matthew Hodgson and Amandine le Pape, and The Reg FOSS desk met both at this year's FOSDEM for a chat about what's happening with Matrix. The Register has covered Matrix and its commercial Element side quite a few times over the years,
The latest release of Xcode, Xcode 26.3, extends support for coding agents, such as Anthropic's Claude Agent and Open's Codex, helping developers tackle complex tasks and improve their productivity. With agentic coding, Xcode can work with greater autonomy toward a developer's goals - from breaking down tasks to making decisions based on the project architecture and using built-in tools. The new release expands the agentic coding capabilities introduced in Xcode 26 by providing coding agents with access to more Xcode's features.
According to Spotify, developer access usage patterns have changed dramatically in recent years. While Development Mode was intended as an accessible sandbox for testing ideas with a limited group of users when it was introduced in 2021, Spotify now sees that scale, automation, and AI bring new risks. Stricter and clearer controls are therefore needed at the current platform level. The new measures build on previous changes, such as tightened access to Web API endpoints, modified quota rules, and the phasing out of outdated authentication
Linus Torvalds has announced that the kernel will continue as Linux 7.0 after version 6.19. The announcement was made via the Linux Kernel Mailing List. The announcement was shared by The Register. The choice of version 7.0 follows the existing versioning policy, whereby kernel series usually end at subversion 19. Previous series, including 5.x and 6.x, followed the same pattern. According to Torvalds (photo), the transition to a new major number is motivated by clarity in versioning.
Last year I first started thinking about what the future of programming languages might look like now that agentic engineering is a growing thing. Initially I felt that the enormous corpus of pre-existing code would cement existing languages in place but now I'm starting to think the opposite is true. Here I want to outline my thinking on why we are going to see more new programming languages and why there is quite a bit of space for interesting innovation.
When staff resort to copying data between spreadsheets, keeping shadow systems in Excel, or doing repetitive tasks that feel like they should be automated, something is wrong. These workarounds creep in gradually; a quick fix here, a temporary solution there, until suddenly your operations depend on a patchwork of manual processes. Workarounds rarely stay small. What begins as a simple spreadsheet to track information your CRM cannot handle eventually becomes a document that multiple team members depend on.
Manual database deployment means longer release times. Database specialists have to spend several working days prior to release writing and testing scripts which in itself leads to prolonged deployment cycles and less time for testing. As a result, applications are not released on time and customers are not receiving the latest updates and bug fixes. Manual work inevitably results in errors, which cause problems and bottlenecks.
DBmaestro is a database release automation solution that can blend the database delivery process seamlessly into your current DevOps ecosystem with minimal fuss, and without complex installation or maintenance. Its handy database pipeline builder allows you to package, verify, and deploy, and gives you the ability to pre-run the next release in a provisional environment to detect errors early. You get a zero-friction pipeline, which is often not the case with database delivery process.
To find the typical example, just observe an average stand-up meeting. The ones who talk more get all the attention. In her article, software engineer Priyanka Jain tells the story of two colleagues assigned the same task. One posted updates, asked questions, and collaborated loudly. The other stayed silent and shipped clean code. Both delivered. Yet only one was praised as a "great team player."
The main promise is isolation: a Docker container that works on an x86_64 Linux machine will work on any x86_64 Linux machine in the same way. Want to quickly set up PostgreSQL for testing? Just run docker run --name postgres -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres -p 5432:5432 -d --restart=unless-stopped postgres and wait a few seconds. Docker is great for deployment as well as production deployments, and it even supports Windows Server containers these days.
Generative AI exponentially brings down the cost of building solutions. It lets people build exactly what they need to solve an exact problem in an exact moment. It lets people own their own solutions. This is great for a lot of specific problems that need specific solutions that wouldn't normally get solved easily. This has been the evergreen promise of computers and programming and hacking. But there's a difference between solving your specific problem, and owning a problem domain.
Microsoft's .NET Framework 3.5 development platform, which dates back to November 2007, is no longer included as an optional Windows component. Microsoft has changed its deployment model to standalone installer status for future Windows versions. In a bulletin published February 5, Microsoft said that beginning with Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27965, .NET Framework 3.5 must be obtained as a standalone installer for applications that require it on newer major versions of Windows.
FreeBSD is a Unix-like operating system that is descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993 and was developed from 386BSD, one of the first fully functional and free Unix clones on affordable hardware. Since its inception, FreeBSD has been the most widely used BSD-derived operating system. FreeBSD maintains a complete system: kernel, device drivers, userland utilities, and documentation.
The project behind this post is intentionally a bit over-engineered - in the "let's see what breaks when things grow" sense. That's by design. While a simple recipe example could easily be modelled with plain strings and numbers, cookbook explores more advanced, real-world concerns: extensibility, customisation, validation, and precise handling of numeric values, including floating-point quantities. The recipe domain is just a familiar, low-stakes vehicle for discussing these deeper ideas.
If there's one thing I want you to take away from this article, it's this: testing harness is the most important thing for vibe-coding. Not prompt engineering, not fancy plugins, just constraining your AI outside AI toolchain. I'm calling it harness because it's not only tests. It's tests, types, linters, and any other automated checks you can put in place. The more you rely on AI, the more harness you need.
PF4J expects that your plugin code has a class that extends org.pf4j.Plugin interface. And for running and stopping the plugin, methods start() and stop() of this interface will be called. But our service is expected to have completely pure logic - without any side effects - we need to bring these two worlds together - Java impure plugins start/stop and Scala pure logic.
Project Genie, which is currently only available for Google's AI Ultra subscribers, uses AI to build virtual worlds. That sounds interesting, if not necessarily revolutionary. Videogame developers already model and build virtual worlds all the time. Project Genie's simple concept, though, belies the tech's potential impact. The new system, and the Genie 3 model behind it, have the potential to forever change how videogames are built and played.
The Amazon SQS Extended Client allows clients to manage Amazon SNS and SQS message payloads that exceed the 256 KB message size limit, up to a size of 2 GB. In the event of publishing such large messages, the client accomplishes this feat by storing the actual payload in a S3 bucket and by storing the reference of the stored object in the SQS queue.
Also: This Linux distro has one of the smartest security features I've seen (and I've tested dozens) However, that's not to say someone with minimal familiarity with the command line would fail with this distribution. For example, if you only need open-source software, NixOS could be a viable option. If, however, you need apps like Chrome, Slack, and Spotify, you might run into some frustration that will send you packing back to Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or Windows.
Databricks today announced the general availability of Lakebase on AWS, a new database architecture that separates compute and storage. The managed serverless Postgres service is designed to help organizations build faster without worrying about infrastructure management. When databases link compute and storage, every query must use the same CPU and memory resources. This can cause a single heavy query to affect all other operations. By separating compute and storage, resources automatically scale with the actual load.
The reason for this is Snap - a Linux application packaging format - creates a local Trash folder for each VS Code version, one that's separate from the system-managed Trash, according to a VS Code bug report dating back to November 11, 2024. Not only that, but Snap keeps older versions of VS Code after updates, potentially multiplying the number of local Trash folders and the trashed-but-not-deleted files therein. Emptying the system Trash folder doesn't affect the local instances.
Benevity is the way the world does good, providing companies (and their employees) with technology to take social action on the issues they care about. Through giving, volunteering, grantmaking, employee resource groups and micro-actions, we help most of the Fortune 100 brands build better cultures and use their power for good. We're also one of the first B Corporations in Canada, meaning we're as committed to purpose as we are to profits.
One thing I always do when I prompt a coding agent is to tell it to ask me any questions that it might have about what I've asked it to do. (I need to add this to my default system prompt...) And, holy mackerel, if it doesn't ask good questions. It almost always asks me things that I should have thought of myself.
Custom agents in GitHub Copilot are tailored versions of the Copilot coding agent that you can define once to follow your own workflows, coding conventions, and tool preferences. They act like specialized teammates that consistently apply your team's standards instead of you repeating the same instructions each time. You configure custom agents using Markdown-based agent profiles that specify prompts, tools, and behaviors.
