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AI updates from the past week: OpenAI Codex, AWS Transform for .NET, and more — May 16, 2025

Software DevelopmentAI updates from the past week: OpenAI Codex, AWS Transform for .NET, and more — May 16, 2025


Software companies are constantly trying to add more and more AI features to their platforms, and AI companies are constantly releasing new models and features. It can be hard to keep up with it all, so we’ve written this roundup to share several notable updates around AI that software developers should know about. 

OpenAI announces software engineering agent Codex

Codex is a cloud-based agent capable of working on multiple tasks simultaneously, such as writing features, answering questions about the codebase, fixing bugs, and proposing pull requests. Each of these tasks runs separately in its own cloud sandbox environment.

“Once Codex completes a task, it commits its changes in its environment. Codex provides verifiable evidence of its actions through citations of terminal logs and test outputs, allowing you to trace each step taken during task completion. You can then review the results, request further revisions, open a GitHub pull request, or directly integrate the changes into your local environment,” OpenAI wrote in a post

It is currently available as a research preview for ChatGPT Pro, Team, and Enterprise users, and support for Plus users will be available soon. 

Amazon announces GA of AWS Transform for .NET

The new tool is an AI agent that helps with modernizing .NET applications, porting them from .NET Framework to cross-platform .NET, which, when done manually is “a labor-intensive and error-prone process. You have to perform multiple steps, such as analyzing the codebase, detecting incompatibilities, implementing fixes while porting the code, and then validating the changes. For enterprises, the challenge becomes even more complex because they might have hundreds of .NET Framework applications in their portfolio,” AWS wrote.  

AWS Transform for .NET can help companies overcome these challenges. Since releasing the tool in private preview last year, Amazon has added several new capabilities, such as support for projects that have private NuGet package dependencies, support for executing unit tests once porting is complete, and the ability to port model-view-controller (MVC) Razor views to ASP .NET Core Razor views.  

Anthropic launches new bug bounty program

The purpose of the program is to enable the community to stress test Anthropic’s latest safety measures. Researchers will be asked to find universal jailbreaks in safety classifiers before they are deployed publicly. 

Specifically, they will test an updated version of the Constitutional Classifiers system, which is a technique developed to “guard against jailbreaks that could elicit information related to CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear) weapons.” It includes a list of principles defining what content should and shouldn’t be allowed when interacting with Claude. 

Anthropic is teaming up with HackerOne to run the program, and it will offer up to $25,000 in rewards for jailbreaks found. 

GitLab 18 integrates AI capabilities from Duo

GitLab has announced the latest version of its platform, incorporating more AI capabilities from Duo, the company’s suite of AI solutions, into the flagship DevSecOps platform.

GitLab 18 includes Duo’s AI-powered Code Suggestions for code completion and code generation, and AI-powered Chat for code explanations, code refactoring, test generation, and code fixes. Those capabilities are available for Premium and Ultimate users.

“Today’s fragmented landscape of AI point solutions creates unnecessary complexity for development teams,” said David DeSanto, chief product officer at GitLab. “By natively integrating the essential capabilities of GitLab Duo Code Suggestions and Chat directly within the GitLab DevSecOps platform, we’re eliminating the need for separate tools, licenses, and governance structures. This unified approach enables teams to accelerate their workflows and improve productivity while maintaining security and compliance standards.”

Boomi launches AI agent management solution at Boomi World 2025

At its annual conference Boomi World 2025, Boomi announced the general availability of Boomi Agentstudio (initially called Boomi AI Studio), an AI agent management solution.

With Boomi Agentstudio, developers are given a no-code platform for designing, governing, and orchestrating AI agents. 

It supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard for connecting AI agents to data sources and tools.

Boomi also announced an integration with Amazon Q Business, allowing agents created in Agentstudio to be grounded in a company’s entire knowledge base. “Imagine an agent that doesn’t just react to shipping delays based on general knowledge gleaned from the internet but instead makes intelligent decisions based on customer contracts, business rules, previous issue resolutions, partner networks, and other data — all of which is available through a company’s knowledge base,” Boomi wrote in a blog post.

CodeRabbit brings AI-powered code review into Visual Studio Code

AI code review provider CodeRabbit announced it’s bringing its solution to the Visual Studio Code editor, shifting code review left into the IDE. This integration places CodeRabbit directly into the Cursor code editor and Windsurf, the AI coding assistant purchased recently by OpenAI for US$3 billion.

By bringing CodeRabbit into VS Code, Cursor, and Windsurf, CodeRabbit is embedding AI at the earliest stages of development. “As we are bringing the reviews within the editor, then those code changes could be reviewed before each are pushed to the central repositories as a PR and also before they even get committed, so that developer can trigger the reviews locally at any time,” Gur Singh, co-founder of the 2-year-old CodeRabbit, told SD Times.

Zencoder launches Zen Agents

Zen Agents are customizable AI agents that understand your code and connect with your tools. Zencoder has launched a platform for customizing them, as well as an open-source marketplace where the community can contribute their own agents for others to use. 

“Zen Agents create the perfect harmony between human creativity and targeted AI assistance,” said Andrew Filev, CEO and founder of Zencoder. “By enabling teams to craft agents with specific expertise and then deploy them organization-wide, we’re helping developers achieve that elusive technical flow state where complex problems seem to solve themselves.”

Anaconda launches unified AI platform

Anaconda AI Platform is a platform that brings together all of the tools needed to source, secure, build, and deploy AI in open source ecosystems. 

It offers Quick Start Environments that are pre-configured, vetted for security, and tailored for Python, finance, and AI/ML development. According to Anaconda, its platform can reduce or eliminate the need to manage configurations so that developers have more time to work on building. 

“The Anaconda AI Platform addresses the evolving needs of our ever-growing user base,” said Laura Sellers, co-president and chief product and technology officer at Anaconda. “Last year, Anaconda customers quadrupled to over one million, underscoring the need for more efficient, secure, and integrated package security management for AI innovation with open source. We are focused on giving everyone the confidence and clarity they need to accomplish their data science and AI goals.”

Parasoft adds agentic AI capabilities to SOAtest

SOAtest’s AI Assistant now uses agentic AI to help with test scenario generation, such as generating test data and parameterizing test scenarios for data looping. 

It can work through multi-step workflows alongside the tester, allowing testers to execute comprehensive tests without scripts, advanced code-level skills, or in-depth domain knowledge.


Read last week’s roundup here: AI updates from the past week: IBM watsonx Orchestrate updates, web search in Anthropic API, and more — May 9, 2025

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