GitHub’s new Agent tasks REST API lets Business and Enterprise users start Copilot cloud-agent work programmatically. That sounds small, but it changes the agentic-coding pattern: instead of a developer manually assigning an issue, internal tools can now fan out migrations, prepare releases and start PR-generating agents as part of the software delivery system.
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Google’s ADK post argues that real enterprise agents need durable memory, event-driven dormancy and explicit state machines. The example is HR onboarding, but the lesson applies to coding agents too: agents that survive restarts, approvals and multi-day waits are infrastructure, not chatbots.
A new METR survey of technical workers reports big perceived AI gains, including median 1.4–2x value uplift and 3x speed uplift. But METR cautions that survey responses are not necessarily grounded in reality, making this a sober read for teams measuring agentic-coding productivity.
GitHub Actions users have a few weeks to test upcoming hosted-runner image changes. The key dates are 8 June for the Windows 2025 Visual Studio 2026 rollout and 15 June for the start of the macOS latest migration to macOS 26.
The most useful Laravel 13.8 changes are operational: inspect reserved, delayed and pending jobs across all queues, and react when workers pause or resume. Those are small framework additions that can make blue-green deploys, worker restarts and Horizon-era runbooks easier to automate.
ESA’s Smile mission is scheduled to launch on 19 May from French Guiana. Its job is unusually elegant: use soft X-rays and ultraviolet aurora views to turn the invisible boundary between solar wind and Earth’s magnetic field into something scientists can watch move.
Researchers re-analysed dozens of RNA-chromatin datasets and studied NESPR lncRNA across expression levels. Their conclusion is a caution for genomics: thousands of neat binding peaks may reflect assay behaviour, missing controls and probe-DNA interactions, not a cell’s regulatory map.
Hubble’s view of NGC 1266 shows a rare post-starburst lenticular galaxy about 100 million light-years away in Eridanus. Astronomers think a minor merger roughly 500 million years ago helped trigger a burst of star formation and feed the central black hole; the galaxy is now running quieter, with dusty filaments and a bright core left as evidence of the transition.
On 17 May 1749, Edward Jenner was born in Berkeley, Gloucestershire. His later smallpox vaccination experiments did not invent immunity, but they helped turn an old rural observation about cowpox into a public-health technology. Two and a quarter centuries later, that line runs through immunology, clinical trials, vaccine logistics and the eradication of smallpox itself.
A programmable silicon-photonics chip is used as a quantum reservoir computer, taking single-photon inputs and producing measurements that can support both quantum tasks and classical machine-learning benchmarks. Treat it as a lab-scale hardware result rather than proof of near-term advantage over GPUs: the value is in showing a reconfigurable photonic platform where machine learning happens partly as physics in a chip, with explicit caveats around scale, noise and experimental imperfections.
arXiv:2605.10471 →