Together with

ISSUE 515
AI coding tools hit a nerve, and MCP's enterprise push

"Success for me looks like most people not knowing what a service mesh is, even though they’re using one."

— Mitch Connors, a principal software engineer at Microsoft, in an interview with The New Stack.

Edge-forward: Akamai eyes sweet spot between centralized & decentralized AI inference

In this edition of The New Stack Makers, Akamai's Lena Hall and Thorsten Hans explain how edge-forward AI inference, WebAssembly, and distributed cloud infrastructure close the latency gap at KubeCon 2026.

The Telemetry Explosion Is Already Happening

Every agent decision, workflow, and customer interaction generates telemetry nonstop at machine speed. Most observability stacks weren't designed for that volume. Apica’s been building for exactly this moment.
Sponsored

AI coding tools hit a nerve, and MCP's enterprise push

Here’s what you were reading last week… David Cassel's deeply reported piece on the real cost of AI programming tools was far and away our most-read story of the week, drawing nearly twice as much traffic as every other article on this list. The headline — "I started to lose my ability to code" — clearly struck a nerve. The piece explores how senior developers are finding renewed energy through tools like Claude Code and LLMs, but it asks a harder question: What happens to code quality when the humans writing it begin to atrophy? It's a tension the industry hasn't resolved, and based on reader interest, a lot of us are thinking about it.

That theme carried over into Janakiram MSV's look at Cursor 3's radical bet — demoting the IDE to a fallback and replacing it with what's essentially an agent-management console. If you're still thinking of your IDE as the hub of your work, Cursor's $2 billion valuation says the market might have a different POV.

Meanwhile, MCP continued its march toward enterprise legitimacy. If you've been curious about building your own MCP server, Jessica Wachtel's tutorial is where to start.

One more worth your time: Anthropic this week quietly launched Claude Mythos — its most capable model yet — but only for select cybersecurity partners. The rest of us will have to wait.

Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next week.

— Nick Lucchesi, editor-in-chief, TNS

Other reader favorites

Sam Altman promised billions for AI safety. Here's what OpenAI actually spent
How Sam Altman's AI safety commitments at OpenAI fell short on hallucinations, deceptive alignment, and oversight.

With Claude Managed Agents, Anthropic wants to run your AI agents for you
Claude Managed Agents abstracts away the months of infrastructure work that have kept most enterprises from shipping agents in production.

Niantic Spatial wants to map the 80% of the economy AI can't see

Niantic Spatial launches Scaniverse to build AI-powered world models using 3D mapping, visual positioning, and spatial intelligence for robots and developers.

Upcoming events & webinars

Developer-led observability: Debugging distributed and AI systems
April 16 | Virtual

Join us on April 16 for a live session on integrating observability into everyday workflows. You’ll see real-world examples and live debugging demonstrations that show how to move faster, escalate less, and build more reliable AI-driven systems from the start.

Google Cloud Next 2026
April 22-24
Las Vegas, NV

Join The New Stack alongside a global community of leaders, thinkers, and doers to share ideas. Immerse yourself in three full days of lightning talks, interactive demos, guided workshops, and more. Plus, get a sneak peek into some of the latest advancements in AI and cloud tech.

The next step for continuous delivery: An IDP-driven platform
April 23 | Virtual

Continuous Delivery solved deployment, but as AI accelerates software delivery, pipelines are still hard for developers to access without tribal knowledge and manual handoffs. Learn how platform teams connect catalog data, environments, and pipelines to reduce friction.

Scaling Kubernetes with systemic certainty, not operational heroics
On-demand

As Kubernetes scales, manual patching and infrastructure drift often become bottlenecks that stall your roadmap and create compliance risks. Join us live to learn how to move beyond a coping-based strategy and adopt an API-driven foundation that scales without increasing your headcount.

Master SQL with roadmap.sh

SQL remains the essential backbone of the modern tech stack, whether you’re optimizing databases or scaling data-driven apps. Our sister site, roadmap.sh, offers a comprehensive SQL course designed to take you from foundational queries to advanced database management through hands-on, practical learning.

Connect with The New Stack