Visual Studio Code update shines on coding agents

Microsoft has released Visual Studio Code 1.109, the latest update of the company’s popular code editor. The new release brings multiple enhancements for agents, including improvements for optimization, extensibility, security, and session management. Released February 4 and also known as the January 2026 release, VS Code 1.109 can be downloaded for Windows, Linux, and macOS…

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OpenScholar Shows Why Grounded AI Matters for Scientific Research

Researchers from the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) and the University of Washington have developed a new open-source AI model named OpenScholar that they claim can synthesize scientific literature and verifiable citations at a level comparable to a human expert. With millions of scientific papers published every year, it’s challenging to keep up with the…

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Databricks adds MemAlign to MLflow to cut cost and latency of LLM evaluation

Databricks’ Mosaic AI Research team has added a new framework, MemAlign, to MLflow, its managed machine learning and generative AI lifecycle development service. MemAlign is designed to help enterprises lower the cost and latency of training LLM-based judges, in turn making AI evaluation scalable and trustworthy enough for production deployments. The new framework, according to…

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The ‘Super Bowl’ standard: Architecting distributed systems for massive concurrency

In the world of streaming, the “Super Bowl” isn’t just a game. It is a distributed systems stress test that happens in real-time before tens of millions of people. When I manage infrastructure for major events (whether it is the Olympics, a Premier League match or a season finale) I am dealing with a “thundering…

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How to reduce the risks of AI-generated code

Vibe coding is the latest tech accelerator, and yes, it kind of rocks. New AI-assisted coding practices are helping developers ship new applications faster, and they’re even allowing other business professionals to prototype workflows and tools without waiting for a full engineering cycle. Using a chatbot and tailored prompts, vibe coders can build applications in…

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