Shuttle has launched Neptune, a universal AI platform engineer that understands code, generates a deterministic infrastructure spec, provisions cloud resources, and integrates with AI coding tools and IDEs. 

Amazon has released Nova Forge, a new service that developers can use to build their own frontier models using Nova. Nova Forge customers can start their development from early model checkpoints, blend their datasets with Amazon Nova-curated training data, and host their custom models securely on AWS. 

There is a big backlash against AI at the moment and given the threat it poses to jobs. this can hardly be an unexpected response. However, much of the backlash focuses on how useless and unimpressive it is. This is crazy. AI has achieved so much of its goal in such a short time, this is an entirely untenable position.

A new Advent calendar had joined those for Java, Kotlin and Rust. We now have  Advent of AI, a series of AI engineering challenges from Goose, that is already underway.

LangGrant has announced its LEDGE MCP server that enables LLMs to reason across multiple enterprise databases and generate multi-step analytics plans without transmitting raw data to the model. The system works entirely with metadata and schema context.

Today, December 9th 2025, is the 119th anniversary of the birth of Grace Hopper. Her concern for teaching young people is why Computer Science Education Week and the Hour of Code, now the Hour of AI, are timed to coincide with her birthday. Her legacy also extends into other areas.

Connect to PostgreSQL database instances, run queries, create and manage connections and more, all from inside VSCode. Just announced, the extension simplifies talking to and managing PostgreSQL databases from the ease of the most popular IDE.

Angular 21 has been released with experimental support for Signal Forms, a developer preview of Angular Aria, and the ability to use Angular's MCP Server via AI Agents. 

The holiday season is a good time to acquire a new skill - you have the time and don't want to go outdoors. How about getting into electronics and home automation? My recommendation for this is the Raspberry Pi Pico, specifically the Pico 2W, where W indicates in-built WiFi.

In the news this week Nikos Vaggalis reminds us that Advent of Code is now underway and that Hour of Code, now renamed Hour of AI to reflect the zeitgeist, is about to start. We also have news from re:Invent and there's a new release of Kotlin. 

A pilot scheme supported by Horizon Europe is investigating the use of AI and robot dogs to detect and mitigate wildfires. 

Apache NetBeans 28 has been released with improvements to Gradle 9 support, better handling of the Maven UI, and expanded JUnit integration.

Codacy has launched two new products to help control genAI coding.  AI Risk Hub and AI Reviewer form a code compliance suite that organizations can use for governance of AI-generated code and smart, context-aware code reviews. 

Microsoft is adding a "semantic intelligence layer" to Fabric to add  that elevates Fabric from a unified data platform to a unified intelligence platform. The announcement says the extra layer will turn an organization's data into "a live, structured, connected model of how your business operates". 

Hour Of Code has been renamed. This year and from now on it will be called "Hour Of AI", giving in to this AI-dictated era. Another indication that coding has shifted from a task of manual labor to one of automated generation. Code.org is a trend setter and crucial to kids' education relating to Computer Science, so the rebranding is highly significant.

This week in Las Vegas, Amazon has made several announcements at its annual user conference, re:Invent, including updates to AWS Transform, and the introduction of Lambda managed instances.

Google has launched a new Google Colab extension for Visual Studio Code. Colab is Google's platform for AI/ML development. 

Microsoft has announced support for more languages in Aspire. The .NET part of its name has also been dropped, and there's a new website rather than just the GitHub repository.