Hi, and welcome to the May edition of this newsletter!
Sorry for the delay in this edition - there are two very good reasons!...
Firstly, I was on holiday! 🌞 Although, typically whilst we were away, the UK decided to have a heatwave with hotter weather than Sardinia! 🤣🤦♂️ I can't complain though - it was an amazing holiday, and such an incredible looking country! 😊
And secondly, the Microsoft Build conference ran from the 2nd to the 3rd June. So given I was running a bit late anyway, it made sense to wait for that to finish, and include the Build announcements as part of this edition. Strictly speaking, they're June news - but if I waited till the June edition at the end of June, it would have been old news by then!
As always, feel free to reply to this email to get in touch. Or ping me on any of my socials, which can be found on my personal website, danclarke.com.
If you get value from this newsletter, please help me out by sharing it on your socials and with your tech friends and colleagues - it really helps me spread the word and keep the newsletter going 🙏 (at-mention me, and I’ll repost).
📰 News items and dev picks
Microsoft Build 2026 highlights
As mentioned in the intro, Build was at the start of June, but I'm putting them in due to this edition going out a bit late.
GitHub Copilot app - the agent-native desktop experience - The Build-day deep dive on the standalone desktop app: a "My Work" view for monitoring parallel agent sessions, plus interactive "canvases" over plans, PRs, and terminals.
GitHub Copilot SDK reaches GA - Embed Copilot's agent runtime in your own apps - .NET is a first-class language alongside Node, Python, Go, Rust, and Java.
MAI-Code-1-Flash - Microsoft's own coding model - A Microsoft-built coding model (a sparse MoE, 137B total / 5B active params) now rolling out in GitHub Copilot for VS Code. Trained on production Copilot harnesses, it beats Claude Haiku 4.5 on SWE-Bench Pro (+16 pts) while using up to 60% fewer tokens.
What's coming next in Visual Studio - Agentic VS: agents that debug/profile/test alongside you, AI merge-conflict resolution, a Web Forms-to-Blazor / add-Aspire modernization agent, and VS moving onto the GitHub Copilot SDK.
What's new in Aspire 13.4 - The TypeScript apphost graduates to GA, plus typed resource commands and more mature AKS publishing.
Coreutils for Windows hits GA - 75+ native Linux commands on Windows, built on the Rust uutils project, with WSL Linux containers coming to public preview.
Microsoft Foundry: production agents - Hosted Agents heading to GA, the Foundry VS Code toolkit GA, expanded agent memory, and four new first-party MAI models.
Azure Cobalt 200 - Microsoft's second-gen custom Arm cloud CPU, up to 50% faster than Cobalt 100.
Azure HorizonDB - A managed, Postgres-compatible database with scale-out compute and built-in vector search, aimed squarely at Aurora/AlloyDB.
Dotnet news
AI news
Project Glasswing: an initial update - A progress report on the Glasswing initiative I covered last month: Anthropic and ~50 partners used Claude Mythos to find 10,000+ high/critical-severity vulnerabilities (6,202 in open source).
Claude Code gets Agent View and the /goal command - Two new features: Agent View (
claude agents) gives you an agent view, listing all your sessions in one place, and allowing you to switch between them. Plus the new/goalcommand, which lets you set a completion goal that Claude works towards. Effectively Claude Code's answer to Codex Goal Mode below.OpenAI Codex Goal Mode reaches GA - Define an outcome plus success criteria and Codex drives toward it autonomously for hours or even days - now default-enabled across the Codex app, IDE extension, and CLI.
Google I/O 2026...
Google Antigravity 2.0 - Google's agent-first dev platform - a standalone desktop app, CLI, and SDK - directly comparable to Claude Code and the new GitHub Copilot app.
Gemini CLI is shutting down (June 18) - Consolidated into the Go-based Antigravity CLI.
WebMCP - A proposed open web standard letting sites expose structured tools so browser-based agents can execute tasks reliably; experimental origin trial in Chrome 149.
Cursor in Jira - Assign a Jira work item to Cursor (or
@Cursorin a comment) to kick off a cloud agent that fixes the bug or adds the feature, then posts the PR link back to Jira.
Others
What's new in Aspire 13.3 - 👉 Note that this was in May, and 13.4 was announced at Build at the start of June (see above).
Gitea CVE-2026-27771 - private container images exposed to anonymous users - A flaw in Gitea's container registry (all versions before 1.26.2) let unauthenticated attackers pull "private" images across ~30,000 deployments, undetected for nearly four years. Patch your self-hosted Gitea!
Supply-chain attacks - another heavy month :(
Dev Comic pick of the month
(source)
Dev Pick - Wispr Flow
My dev pick this month is Wispr Flow - and I'm genuinely surprised it's taken me this long to mention it, because I use it constantly! It's an AI voice dictation tool that works in any text field, in any app - you hold a key, talk, and it drops polished text in wherever your cursor is, automatically cleaning up the ums, ahs, and false starts as it goes. It's available on Windows, Mac, and mobile. Mobile being a more recent addition, I find this works really well when I'm on a walk and I can just dictate into whatever app I'm using, whether that be Whatsapp, Claude, or whatever.
The thing that's made it click for me is using it to drive my AI coding agents. Typing out a long, detailed prompt to Claude Code is tedious - but rambling it out loud is effortless. It's also great for everyday writing - messages, emails, notes, even chunks of this newsletter. Once you get used to talking to your computer, going back to typing everything feels weirdly slow. Well worth a try!
If you do want to sign up, here's my referral link: https://wisprflow.ai/r?DAN1741
The free tier goes a long way. If you want a similar experience, but don't want your dictations to be cloud-processed - there's also Handy, which is free and open-source, and runs a local model.
My Blog 📝
Just one blog post this month, and this is on OpenSpec...
OpenSpec - a lightweight AI-driven spec framework - A deeper look at OpenSpec, which I picked as my dev pick a couple of months back. I walk through how its "explore" mode does a brilliant job of drawing out requirements before any code gets written, and how the specs it generates double-up as excellent context primers for future related work. It's become a real part of my day-to-day AI workflow.
Sponsorship opportunities
I’m looking for sponsors for both the podcast and this newsletter. Details of podcast sponsorship can be found here. Feel free to reply to this email to discuss further.
The Podcast 🎙
This month's episode is a bit of a special one - a live AI panel discussion recorded at DDD South West 2026, in front of an audience!
I was joined by a brilliant panel - Chaithali Shashikanth Kundapur, Rachel Breeze, Richard Fennell, Lotte Pitcher, Kevlin Henney, and Stuart Caborn - to dig into how AI is affecting software developers. We got into all the big questions: is AI a threat to our jobs, how much code are we actually writing by hand these days, how should we be reviewing AI-generated code, and what it all means for programming languages and for people just starting out in the industry. Recording in front of a live audience made it a really fun one - well worth a listen :)
Also, just a reminder that we have a Discord community for the podcast! It would be great to see you there :)
Podcast Discord community
My Dometrain Courses
Below are details of my Dometrain courses. There's also a Containers learning path that includes both the Docker and Kubernetes courses, which can be found here.
Docker for Developers
This course will teach you everything you need to know about Docker and containers. From what containers and images are; to how to build your own; to security and networking; docker-compose; and much more!
Kubernetes for Developers
Once you understand Docker, containers, images, etc - it’s time to move onto the next level and learn a container orchestrator - and Kubernetes has clearly won the battle here! My Kubernetes course is rammed-packed full of demos (pretty much all the way through), which are easy to follow along with downloadable YAML files and scripts. We start with the basics, then later move on to more advanced topics like service meshes and operators.
JetBrains Rider
Rider is an amazing .NET IDE by JetBrains. This course is 6 hours of content - covering hotkeys, refactoring, navigation, debugging, git, testing, AI, profiling, remote collaboration, and much much more!
Aspire
Aspire is Microsoft's vision for how every .NET developer will develop systems. It is a cloud-ready stack for production-ready, distributed applications using .NET, and it makes it extremely easy to develop, run, and test your systems locally. With unmatched dev-time orchestration, integrations with third-party services, and excellent tooling, .NET Aspire aims to make working with the cloud and technologies like Docker and Kubernetes easier than ever.
If you’ve made it this far into the newsletter - I’m hoping that means you’ve
both enjoyed it and found it useful. If you can help me out and share with your developer friends at work and on social media, that would be amazing!
Again - feel totally free to reach out to me, and let me know your thoughts on the newsletter. And see you back in your inbox next month for the next edition! 👋
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