Coding news

Meta buys Conductor, and OpenAI agrees to buy Pierre

Both startups make tools for developers who work with coding agents. Conductor Cloud goes read-only on November 13 and shuts on November 20. OpenAI’s deal still needs regulators’ approval. Neither price is public.

Meta has acquired Conductor, an app that runs several coding agents at once, the startup and Meta confirmed on November 4. The same day, OpenAI said it will acquire Pierre Computer Company, the maker of Code Storage and of two libraries already used in Codex. No prices were disclosed. Conductor users need to move their cloud work soon.

US computer science enrollment drops 12% this fall

Early data from the National Student Clearinghouse show double-digit falls at four-year colleges, two-year colleges and graduate schools. Total college enrollment stayed about the same.

Fewer students in the United States are studying computer science, according to early fall 2026 data published on October 29 by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Enrollment in computer and information science fell 12.4% at four-year colleges, 12.3% at two-year colleges and 10.4% at graduate schools. Total enrollment rose 0.2%.

GitHub’s Copilot Fusion now picks AI models for each task

Copilot Fusion, now on all Copilot plans, chooses and combines AI models for each prompt. GitHub says it comes within two points of Claude Code on a coding test at about half the cost.

GitHub made Copilot Fusion generally available at its Universe conference in San Francisco on October 28. Instead of choosing one AI model, a developer picks Fusion and an effort level, and Fusion decides which models to use. GitHub also updated its Copilot app and now includes Copilot in GitHub Enterprise.

OpenCode hack exposes users’ AI keys, runs up bills

Attackers got into an old part of the coding tool’s Console service. OpenCode says 1.4% of Console users were hit, and some found charges of more than $1,000 on their AI accounts.

Attackers broke into OpenCode’s Console, the paid web service of a popular open-source AI coding agent, and may have taken users’ saved keys for OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. OpenCode says 1.4% of Console users were affected. Some users found charges of more than $1,000 on their AI accounts.

DeepSeek releases an open update of its V4.1 Flash model

DeepSeek says the new version scores higher on coding and agent tests, finishes tasks faster and writes shorter answers. Anyone can download it under the MIT licence, and no outside group has tested it yet.

DeepSeek released DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 on October 17, a “minor update” to the V4.1 Flash model it launched on September 10. The weights are on Hugging Face, and the API price stays the same. In DeepSeek’s own table, the model scores 77.0 on the DeepSWE coding test, up from 74.2.

Google lets people install their own AI-made Android apps

Apps built with Google AI Studio can now be launched through Google Play with a standard Google account, without a developer account. They stay private, and sharing with friends is planned for the coming months.

Since October 13, people can put an Android app they built with Google AI Studio on their own devices through Google Play. It works for adults in the United States and some other markets. They need only a standard Google account, not the developer account that costs $25. The apps don’t appear in the public store.

Claude Code adds mods that can rewrite how the agent works

Plugins can now change prompts, tool calls and the screen of Anthropic’s coding agent. Anthropic warns that mods run with the user’s permissions and are not sandboxed.

Anthropic added Claude Mods to its coding agent Claude Code in version 2.1.287 on October 1. Mods are small JavaScript or TypeScript functions, shipped in plugins, that react to events inside the agent. Anthropic’s documentation says they run with the user’s permissions and are not sandboxed.

GitLab fixes a 9.9-rated flaw in its self-hosted AI gateway

A user of GitLab’s Duo Agent Platform could escape a prompt template’s sandbox and run commands on the server. GitLab says its own hosted gateways are already fixed.

GitLab released fixes on October 2 for CVE-2026-90970, a critical flaw in its AI Gateway, the service that connects GitLab’s AI features to models. A logged-in user with access to the Duo Agent Platform could send a crafted flow configuration and run any command on the gateway.

Pop!_OS maker bans AI-generated code from its COSMIC desktop

System76 now rejects LLM-written code, comments and descriptions in pull requests and issues across its Pop!_OS projects. Reports say AI-made submissions were swamping reviewers.

System76, which makes the Linux system Pop!_OS and its COSMIC desktop, changed its contribution rules on September 30. Every pull request must now confirm it contains no content generated by an LLM, “including code, comments, and descriptions”. Pull requests without the completed checklist will be closed.

Meta says its new AI agent can finish work with fewer steps

Meta says Muse Spark 1.3 uses fewer tool calls and fewer tokens than the earlier version. Users should check if it also needs less help when a task goes wrong.