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Contributor

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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Blogs

GitHub Actions Gets Serious About Self-Hosted Runner Versions

GitHub is resuming enforcement of minimum version requirements for GitHub Actions self-hosted runners — and this time, the deadlines are firm. After a rocky start that included multiple delays and a temporary pause earlier this year, GitHub has published a clear enforcement timeline for both GitHub Enterprise Cloud and GitHub Enterprise Cloud with Data Residency. […]

Tom Smith · Jun 16, 2026
Blogs

GitHub Enterprise Server 3.21 Is Now Generally Available

GitHub has released GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) 3.21, the latest version of its self-hosted platform for enterprise development teams. The release focuses on improving deployment efficiency, monitoring, code security, and policy management — areas that matter most to enterprise DevOps teams managing complex environments at scale. Here’s a look at what’s new and why it […]

Tom Smith · Jun 16, 2026
AI

GitHub Removes PAT Requirement for Agentic Workflows

GitHub Agentic Workflows can now use GitHub Actions’ built-in GITHUB_TOKEN instead of a personal access token (PAT). That means developers no longer need to create, store, or rotate a PAT to run agentic workflows, eliminating both the operational hassle and the security risks that come with managing long-lived tokens at scale.

Tom Smith · Jun 15, 2026
Blogs

npm v12 Is Coming in July — Here’s What Developers Need to Do Now

For years, running npm install meant trusting that whatever code got pulled in would behave itself. That trust was often misplaced. Starting in July 2026, npm v12 changes the rules. Install scripts won’t run automatically anymore. Neither will dependencies be pulled from Git repos or remote URLs. All of it becomes opt-in. This is a […]

Tom Smith · Jun 11, 2026
AI

Visual Studio Code 1.123 Brings Deeper AI Integration and Smarter Agent Tools

Microsoft released Visual Studio Code 1.123 on June 3, expanding its AI-assisted development capabilities with features that reflect the editor’s direction: toward a more agentic, context-aware workflow. The update is relatively focused, but several additions stand out to developers who rely on Copilot and other AI models day to day. A Million-Token Context Window One […]

Tom Smith · Jun 8, 2026
AI

xAI Opens Grok Build 0.1 to Developers via API

xAI’s Grok Build 0.1 is now available in public beta via the xAI API — a fast, purpose-built coding model for agentic workflows, debugging, and MCP support.

Tom Smith · Jun 1, 2026
AI

Cursor’s Composer 2.5 Brings Smarter, More Reliable AI Coding Agents

AI-assisted coding tools are getting a meaningful upgrade. Cursor has released Composer 2.5, the latest version of its proprietary coding agent model, and the improvements go well beyond a version bump. Composer 2.5 is described as a substantial improvement in intelligence and behavior over its predecessor, Composer 2. It handles sustained work on long-running tasks […]

Tom Smith · May 19, 2026
AI

GitHub Copilot Gets Its Own App — and It’s More Than a Coding Assistant

GitHub has launched a standalone Copilot desktop app in technical preview, moving beyond the IDE to introduce a dedicated cockpit for agentic development. The app enables developers to manage parallel, isolated agent sessions directly from GitHub issues, while introducing “Agent Merge”—a feature that autonomously fixes CI failures and handles code reviews to streamline the entire PR lifecycle.

Tom Smith · May 19, 2026
AI

Microsoft Copilot Studio Brings Computer-Using Agents to the Enterprise

For years, IT and DevOps teams have wrestled with the same stubborn problem: how do you automate workflows in systems that were never built for automation? Legacy apps, vendor portals, and proprietary line-of-business platforms rarely offer APIs. That means someone, usually a human, ends up clicking through screens, entering data, and completing transactions by hand. […]

Tom Smith · May 18, 2026
AI

xAI Enters the Coding Agent Race With Grok Build

Elon Musk’s xAI has entered the developer workspace with Grok Build, a local-first coding agent featuring an automated “Arena Mode” that runs and ranks parallel AI outputs to rival Anthropic and OpenAI

Tom Smith · May 15, 2026
AI

AWS Security Agent Brings Full Repository Code Scanning to Preview

Security teams have long relied on static analysis tools to catch vulnerabilities before code ships. Those tools are useful, but they have a fundamental limitation: they match code against known patterns. They don’t understand your application. AWS is taking a different approach with its latest addition to AWS Security Agent. The company recently released full […]

Tom Smith · May 14, 2026