Cursor just shipped a feature that reframes what a coding AI tool is for. Automations — now rolling out across Cursor accounts — lets you define coding agents that trigger automatically based on events: a new commit, a Slack message, a scheduled timer. You stop prompting. The agents start running. This is the shift from interactive to ambient coding assistance, and it’s a genuinely different paradigm. What Cursor Automations Actually Does Before Automations, Cursor (and every other AI coding tool) was reactive: you opened the editor, asked a question, got a response. Useful, but fundamentally a fancier autocomplete. ...

ExpressVPN shipped something genuinely novel on March 5, 2026: the first VPN MCP server from any major VPN provider. It lets AI tools read your VPN status and change connection settings directly from development environments — no app-switching, no GUI. It’s a beta, it’s available now, and it’s worth understanding what it actually enables. What the ExpressVPN MCP Server Does The MCP server exposes two core capabilities to any MCP-compatible AI client: ...

Google quietly published something very useful on GitHub in early March: gws, a command-line interface for the full Google Workspace API surface. It ships with 100+ pre-built agent skills covering Gmail, Drive, Docs, Calendar, and Chat — and it includes a built-in MCP server that lets AI clients like Claude Desktop, Gemini CLI, and VS Code access your Workspace directly. This is the thing that used to require a custom OAuth flow, API client library setup, and a day of plumbing. Now it’s a CLI install and a config file. ...

The payments infrastructure problem for agentic AI is real: when an AI agent makes a purchase on your behalf, how does the merchant know it was actually authorized? How does your bank verify the agent followed your instructions? How do you audit what happened afterward? On Thursday, Mastercard announced its answer: Verifiable Intent, an open-source, standards-based framework for agentic commerce. What Verifiable Intent Does Verifiable Intent addresses three things that current payment infrastructure doesn’t handle well for AI agents: ...

OpenAI dropped a significant update on March 5, 2026: GPT-5.4, a model built from the ground up for autonomous agent work. It ships with two things practitioners have been waiting for — native computer-use capabilities and a 1M-token context window in API preview. If you build agents, this changes your architecture options in real ways. What Actually Shipped GPT-5.4 comes in two variants: Standard GPT-5.4 — The default API model with native computer-use support and 1M-token context GPT-5.4 Pro — A higher-performance tier aimed at complex, long-horizon tasks The model is available in ChatGPT, the Codex environment, and the API. Microsoft Foundry integration is also confirmed, meaning enterprise teams using Azure AI Foundry can access it without a separate onboarding. ...

OpenAI published something unusual in early March 2026: a framework that isn’t a model wrapper, a chat interface, or a prompt toolkit. Symphony is an open-source orchestration layer for autonomous coding agents — and it’s built in Elixir, a language choice that says something specific about what the framework is designed to do. What Symphony Does Symphony connects issue trackers to LLM-based coding agents through what it calls implementation runs — structured, stateful execution processes that transform a project task into an automated sequence of code changes. ...

This is an update post. We covered the initial Pentagon concerns on February 28 and the defense contractor fallout on March 4. Here’s what’s genuinely new. The Pentagon sent Anthropic formal written notification on Thursday, March 5, designating the company a supply-chain risk to national security. This is a legal and procurement designation — not just informal concern or policy discussion. It has real consequences for government contractors who use Claude-based tools. ...

A ZDNET survey of chief data officers finds that 50% of organizations deploying agentic AI cite data quality and retrieval issues as their primary barrier. Executives are responding by increasing data management investment specifically to unblock agent deployments — not as a general data hygiene initiative, but as a direct prerequisite for getting agents into production. If you’re in that 50%, here’s a practical framework for what to actually fix. ...

Researchers at Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 have published documentation of real-world indirect prompt injection attacks — and this is one of those security stories that deserves more attention from the AI builder community than it’s currently getting. The attack is conceptually simple and practically dangerous: a malicious actor embeds hidden instructions in a website’s content. When an AI agent browses that page as part of an automated task, it reads the hidden instructions and executes them — without the user ever seeing what happened. ...

LangChain just released something that deserves more attention than it’s getting: a skills system for AI coding agents that nearly quadruples Claude Code’s success rate on LangChain and LangGraph tasks — from 25% to 95%, according to the official LangChain blog. That’s not a marginal improvement. That’s the difference between a tool that frustrates you half the time and one that actually ships working code. What the Skills System Is LangChain Skills is a structured way to give AI coding agents precisely the context they need for ecosystem-specific work — without bloating the agent’s context window with everything upfront. ...