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Five AI rivals just backed a shared plugin standard. Here’s why it matters for developers.
OpenAI, AWS, Cursor, GitHub and Microsoft have backed Agent Plugins 1.0.0, a vendor-neutral standard proposed by Vercel that packages Agent Skills and MCP servers into a portable format for AI agent clients. Grainger's Pavan Madduri warns it defers governance and permissions management to each client, calling that a security risk rather than an architecture.
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Experts look ahead at the next 20 years of robotics at RoboBusiness
RoboBusiness 2026 runs Oct. 20-21 in Santa Clara and marks the event's 20th anniversary with an opening keynote featuring Rodney Brooks of Robust AI, Jonathan Hurst of Agility Robotics and Ken Goldberg of UC Berkeley, moderated by The Robot Report's Steve Crowe. The panel will look back at two decades of robotics and forward at the technologies and challenges shaping the next twenty years.
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Video Friday: Drones Go Heavy in DARPA Lift Challenge
This week's Video Friday features the DARPA Lift Challenge along with NASA's Skyfall water-hunting Martian helicopter and gecko-inspired robotic grippers.
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Podcast: Culture & Methods Trends 2026: The Human Side of AI Engineering
This episode of InfoQ's Culture and Methods podcast gathers a panel of QCon speakers and InfoQ contributors to discuss AI adoption maturity and risk, changes to engineering team structures and roles, and the human dimensions of software development for 2026. It forms one half of the annual Culture and Methods Trends Report, alongside a companion written report.
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How Microsoft sees engineering bottlenecks changing with AI
Microsoft CoreAI's Tim Bozarth discusses Engineering Thrive, the company's framework for measuring productivity through speed, ease and quality rather than activity metrics like lines of code or pull request counts. He says AI is shrinking the time engineers spend writing code while shifting bottlenecks toward planning and validating whether the result can be trusted.
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The Pulse: Bending Spoons' Acquisition Strategy
Bending Spoons has acquired Airtable for $1.285B in cash, below the $1.4B Airtable had raised in funding and far under its $11B valuation from a December 2021 round. The deal follows Bending Spoons' pattern from acquisitions like Evernote, where its engineers found a Java 11 monolith running on 750 manually provisioned virtual machines and rationalized the architecture.
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Stripe Uses Graph Search and State Machines to Automate Database Remediation
Stripe's engineering team modeled its MongoDB infrastructure as a graph and now uses graph search algorithms, including Dijkstra's algorithm, alongside state machines to compute and execute database remediation plans automatically. The system has cut database-related pager alerts by about 30%, saving roughly 200 pages and an estimated 12 days of unhealthy shard states per year.
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