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Tom Smith

Tom Smith (C. Thomas Smith III) is a veteran digital analyst and content strategist who spent more than four years as a Research Analyst at DZone.com (part of Devada), where he conducted thousands of interviews with technology executives and authored roughly 1,500 articles that generated more than 10 million page views across topics including AI/ML, Agile, APIs, cloud computing, DevOps, IoT, Java, Kubernetes, microservices, and security. He holds an MBA in Marketing from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and a B.A. in Political Science from Duke. Smith later worked as a content strategist and technical writer at Cognizant, including stints on Google's Bard (now Gemini) and Meta's AI Business Assistant (MAIBA) "seed" content teams, where he helped train and evaluate large language models. Over his career, he has interviewed more than 4,000 technology executives across AI, cloud, data, security, and storage sectors. He now writes independently through Insights From Analytics and is a contributing writer across multiple Techstrong Group properties, including DevOps.com, Digital CxO, Cloud Native Now, PlatformEngineering.com, and Techstrong.ai, where he covers AI agents, enterprise AI infrastructure, and emerging developer tools.

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AI

Microsoft’s New Testing Agent Tackles the Trust Gap in AI-Generated Code

AI coding assistants write code fast. Whether that code can be trusted is a separate question, and it’s becoming a more urgent one. Surveys this year put average developer trust in AI-generated output at just above the midpoint of a five-point scale, and more than half of developers admit they ship AI code without testing […]

Tom Smith · Aug 7, 2026
AI

OpenAI’s Codex Context Cut Puts Enterprise AI Coding Workflows on Notice

OpenAI quietly trimmed the default input context window for GPT-5.6 inside its Codex CLI, dropping it from 372,000 tokens to 272,000 tokens. That’s a 27% cut, and developers noticed fast. The change surfaced in a GitHub pull request to the Codex CLI, and within days, developers on Reddit and X were asking why OpenAI shrunk […]

Tom Smith · Jul 22, 2026
AI

VS Code 1.129 Moves Agent Sessions Out of the Editor Window

Microsoft has released Visual Studio Code 1.129, and the headline change isn’t a new feature so much as a new foundation. The update introduces the agent host, a dedicated process that runs AI coding agents like Copilot, Claude, and Codex outside the editor itself, using a new open protocol called the Agent Host Protocol (AHP). […]

Tom Smith · Jul 22, 2026
AI

xAI Open-Sources Grok Build Coding Agent After Cloud Upload Exposes SSH Keys, Repos

xAI has published the full source code for Grok Build, its terminal-based AI coding agent, on GitHub under an Apache 2.0 license. The release lands three days after a security researcher showed the tool quietly shipping entire developer repositories — SSH keys and password databases included — to a Google Cloud bucket xAI controls. The […]

Tom Smith · Jul 20, 2026
Blogs

Enterprise Smart Contracts Have a Cryptography Problem. EY Just Built a Way Around It

The business case for smart contracts is building fast. Major financial institutions are using programmable, code-based agreements to underpin financial workflows, supply chain operations, and tokenization initiatives. Developers are being asked to prove the value. But there’s a problem most organizations don’t fully see until they’re already stuck: Privacy. Public blockchains are transparent by design. […]

Tom Smith · Jul 9, 2026
Blogs

Microsoft Brings the Azure SDK for Rust to General Availability

Microsoft has moved the Azure SDK for Rust out of beta and into general availability, giving Rust developers a stable, production-ready way to connect to core Azure services. The release covers Core, Identity, Key Vault (Secrets, Keys, and Certificates), and Storage (Blobs and Queues), built around the same design patterns already used in the .NET, Java, JavaScript, Python, Go, and C++ SDKs.

Tom Smith · Jun 23, 2026