AI

  • Anthropic announced Claude Sonnet 3.7, and every vendor Anthropic partners with announced an update of some form. Centers of gravity shift over time, it will be interesting to watch where the AI centers of gravity end up.

  • There is a video doing the rounds of two AI Agents talking to each other. It looks very cool, if slow. IDC analyst Neil Ward-Dutton cuts through the noise in a single Linkedin comment explaining how each “agent” users ggwave, a data transfer over sound protocol. The point here is not debunking the demo. Its cool in a way. But more to ask people to look a little closer at each amazing “breakthrough” AI demo they are seeing.

  • Google announced a free tier for Gemini Code Assist, joining the free tier of GitHub Copilot among others (I work at GitHub). Competition is good.

  • MongoDB acquired VoyageAI. MongoDB is actively trying to position for GenAI, starting with Vector Search. This acquisition builds on that strategy.

General Interest

  • Fascinating post from the team at Northflank on why they ditched next.js. They highlight one of the glaring issues of primarily single vendor frameworks - the tight coupling that often comes as a project morphs into a company, as seen with the Vercel / next.js relationship. It does also raise a different question on do we need frameworks at all.

  • On the subject of what might kill frameworks, a former colleague of mine at Gartner, Danny Brian, has been advocating for Web Components for a long time, and flagged them once again in a recent note: JavaScript: Top Use Cases, Frameworks and Architecture Constraints (paywall). Web Components Will Kill JavaScript Frameworks (Eventually) is a nice piece on medium on the same topic. Arguably the rapid advance in AI Coding Assistants could accelerate a move from frameworks. Arguably.

  • IBM announced they are acquiring Datastax. This is a big one and the first really big acquisition of 2025 by IBM. Datastax has raised $342M.

  • Continuing on the IBM theme, their acquisition of Hashicorp has cleared the UK Competitions and Markets Authority (CMA) merger inquiry. I wrote about this acquisition last April. I am still puzzled as to why the CMA felt a need to get involved given how tiny the deal is.