Microsoft's newly released Agent Framework Harness packages the loops, planning, memory, context management and safety controls that developers previously had to assemble around AI models themselves.
Microsoft is moving Agent Skills beyond bring-your-own instructions by shipping expert-authored workflows with the IDE, while keeping them off by default until testing shows their benefits justify the additional token use.
GitHub is layering spending limits, expanded credit allowances and increasingly granular usage reporting onto Copilot, while Microsoft is reworking Visual Studio and VS Code to expose -- and reduce -- the cost of agentic development.
René van Osnabrugge makes the case that AI's biggest opportunity in software development is not faster coding -- it's reducing the friction everywhere else in the SDLC.