Building AI apps and agents with Microsoft Foundry

At first glance, Microsoft Foundry looks like a big grab bag of every AI-adjacent service that Microsoft has offered in the last decade, plus some new ones. In Microsoft’s own words, “Foundry consolidates several previous Azure AI services and tools into a unified platform” and “unifies agents, models, and tools under a single management grouping.”…

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Designing front-end systems for cloud failure

Modern frontend applications rely on cloud services for far more than basic data fetching. Authentication, search, file uploads, feature flags, notifications and analytics often depend on APIs and managed services running behind the scenes. Because of that, frontend reliability is closely tied to cloud reliability, even when the frontend team does not directly own the…

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No, AI won’t destroy software development jobs

I’m not even remotely worried about AI eliminating software development jobs. In fact, I’m pretty sure there will soon be a boom in both software development jobs and the amount of software available to everyone.  People have always worried about automation causing massive unemployment. Each time a breakthrough happens, folks are sure that “it will be different…

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Supply-chain attacks take aim at your AI coding agents

Attackers too are looking to cash in on the AI coding craze, adapting their supply-chain techniques to target coding agents themselves. Many AI agents autonomously scan package registries such as NPM and PyPI for components to integrate into their coding projects, and attackers are beginning to take advantage of this. Bait packages with persuasive descriptions…

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