Microsoft’s July update to Visual Studio 2026 adds a new Agent (Preview) in Copilot Chat, built on the same SDK that powers the standalone Copilot CLI. That shared foundation means the CLI and in-IDE agent are converging onto one implementation, so behavior you learn in one should transfer to the other.
The update also adds built-in .NET and Azure skills, and lets org owners set custom instructions that apply automatically across every developer in a GitHub org instead of each person configuring their own.
What to check: if you’re on Visual Studio 2026, update to the Stable Channel and try the new Agent against a task you’d normally hand to Copilot CLI.
On the security side, Nvidia and more than 30 companies launched the Open Secure AI Alliance on July 27 to build shared open-source AI security tooling. Microsoft, IBM, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, Red Hat, and Hugging Face are founding members. OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are all absent.
Supported by Cube
Ask three tools for last quarter's revenue and you'll get three answers — every disconnected dashboard, spreadsheet, and AI bot calculates it its own way. Cube ends the drift. Cube is the agentic analytics platform where metrics are defined once and every surface reads from them: reports, dashboards built by AI or drag-and-drop, analytics embedded in your own product, and AI agents 400+ companies like Wix, Patagonia, Brex, and Webflow build on it.
The Model Context Protocol’s biggest revision since launch shipped yesterday. The protocol core drops its stateful session entirely and moves to plain request/response, so sticky sessions, shared Redis session stores, and gateway-level request inspection are no longer required — a server can now sit behind a standard round-robin load balancer.
MCP Apps and Tasks now ship as versioned, opt-in extensions instead of core protocol behavior, so they can evolve on their own schedule. Authorization also moved closer to standard OAuth/OIDC, and a new twelve-month deprecation policy means nothing gets pulled without warning.
What to check: confirm whether your server or client is on the new stateless transport or still negotiating down to 2025-11-25. Both interoperate for now, but the deprecation clock started yesterday.
Quick hits
Kimi K3’s open weights went live July 27 under a Modified MIT license: a 2.8-trillion-parameter model, free for commercial use, with quantized builds from roughly 594GB up to the full 1.4TB.
Claude’s shared conversation pages turned up in Google and Bing search because they relied on robots.txt without a noindex tag. Reminder for anyone shipping a sharing feature: robots.txt doesn’t stop indexing once a page gets linked anywhere. noindex is the tag that does.
MCP’s Tier 1 SDKs (Python, TypeScript, Go, C#) all shipped updated releases alongside the spec.
One link worth keeping
The Register’s writeup on MCP’s break from its stateful past, straight from the people running MCP infrastructure at scale.
That’s it for today.