#ai-assisted-coding

#ai-assisted-coding

There's a certain delight to be had in doing something just to see if you can. Case in point: rendering Doom using PCB design software, or wading through the shores of Hell via the medium of an oscilloscope. Enter Mike Ayles, who pondered if it was possible to render Doom in vectors using KiCad. The answer? Of course it was. Doom can run on pretty much anything.

Some software developers complain that they're being required to use AI tools to the detriment of code quality and their own skills. A full-stack developer based in India, who identified himself to The Register but asked not to be named, explained that the financial software company where he's worked for the past few months has made a concerted effort to force developers to use AI coding tools while downsizing development staff.

Google today announced a new(ish) programmer's development environment called Antigravity. The company calls it "a new era in AI-assisted software development." And, from a first look I took at its functionality via this video, it well might be. At least for some things. Also: Google's Gemini 3 is finally here and it's smarter, faster, and free to access Some aspects of Antigravity are definitely astonishingly good. It has some features that I think can truly help move your agent-assisted programming forward in very productive ways.

Anthropic has expanded the availability of Claude Code, its AI-powered development environment, bringing it to the web and mobile platforms. Previously limited to desktop access through Claude.ai and API integrations, the new rollout allows developers to run and manage coding tasks directly in a browser or on mobile devices. Claude Code is designed to help developers write, edit, and execute code across multiple files while maintaining conversational context. The web version introduces parallel job execution, allowing users to run several processes simultaneously.

One of the really interesting findings was the median date when developers started using AI tools. They found it was April 2024, which corresponds fairly neatly to Claude 3 coming out and Gemini 2.5 coming out. This is really the dawn of the reasoning or thinking models, and around that same time, we got much better at tool-calling. For coding tasks, you really need to be able to leverage external information in order to problem solve,

Figma is launching some new updates that allow AI models to directly communicate with its app-building tool and access designs remotely. Figma's Model Context Protocol (MCP) server - a bridge that enables AI models to tap directly into the code behind prototypes and designs created using Figma's tools - has now been expanded to support the design platform's AI prompt-to-app coding tool, Figma Make.

There is a plague in software development as of today, and it has become something we are gradually beginning to accept. It goes something like this: you're stuck on some code, so you deliver a code snippet to your favorite AI tool, hoping to debug it. You might get a solution, but then your AI tool introduces a new bug, which you suddenly have to spend time debugging.

Nearly three-quarters of organizations have suffered at least one security breach or incident in the last year that can be blamed on insecure coding practices. Analysis from SecureFlag found 74% of organizations have suffered an incident as a result of dodgy code, with nearly half of those hit by multiple breaches. The report comes as AI is beginning to take over some coding duties from developers. Debate remains over whether that code is secure.

"How's that going to work when ten years in the future you have no one that has learned anything," he asked. "My view is you absolutely want to keep hiring kids out of college and teaching them the right ways to go build software and decompose problems and think about it, just as much as you ever have."