Planet Ingres

 A new Advent calendar had joined those for Java, Kotlin and Rust. We now have  Advent of AI, a series of AI engineering challenges from Goose, that is already underway.

https://www.i-programmer.info/news/204-challenges/18518-the-goose-advent-of-ai-has-commenced.html

 Connect to PostgreSQL database instances, run queries, create and manage connections and more, all from inside VSCode. Just announced, the extension simplifies talking to and managing PostgreSQL databases from the ease of the most popular IDE.

https://www.i-programmer.info/news/90-tools/18512-postgresql-extension-for-visual-studio-code.html

 Hour Of Code has been renamed. This year and from now on it will be called "Hour Of AI", giving in to this AI-dictated era. Another indication that coding has shifted from a task of manual labor to one of automated generation. Code.org is a trend setter and crucial to kids' education relating to Computer Science, so the rebranding is highly significant.

 It's Advent, the time of year when we countdown the days to Christmas having fun doing daily coding challenges. Advents, in the programming sense, are events hosting programming puzzles announced every day till Christmas, aimed at a variety of skill levels.

https://www.i-programmer.info/news/204-challenges/18494-advent-of-code-2025-commences.html

 A new course, thanks to Andrew Ng and his partnership with Box, that shows how you can leverage MCP servers to offload otherwise laborious and custom-made work.

https://www.i-programmer.info/news/150-training-a-education/18489-build-ai-apps-with-mcp-servers-with-deeplearningai.html

 The official release of Vaadin MCP server is a reality.

What does it make different?

Yes I'm a fan of Vaadin. I've used it in a couple of projects and productivity was sky high. For those not initiated to the framework, Vaadin allows you to write Java code for the front-end and back-end; no Javascript required, which is an unlikely dream for full stack engineers that nevertheless turned to reality.

https://www.i-programmer.info/news/80-java/18481-vaadin-now-does-mcp.html

 DPAI is an open platform for benchmarking AI coding Agents. Haven't we got enough benchmarks and evaluations already?

To answer this question, yes we have; but for LLM performance, not coding agent performance. And by that we mean comparing for instance:

Anthropic Claude Code CLI AI Agent
           vs
Google Gemini CLI AI Agent
          vs
JetBrains Junie AI Agent (Claude Sonnet)
          vs
JetBrains Junie AI Agent (GPT 5)
         vs
OpenAI Codex CLI AI Agent

https://www.i-programmer.info/news/90-tools/18475-jetbrains-developer-productivity-ai-arena-is-a-game-changer.html

The more elaborate the prompt the better the outcome. But how do I construct a really great prompt? The answer to that question is given by this free, official Anthropic step-by-step guide which shows how to construct prompts that get optimal answers out of the Claude LLM.

https://www.i-programmer.info/news/150-training-a-education/18470-anthropics-prompt-engineering-tutorial.html

 Deepnote, hailed as the Jupyter Notebook successor,is now open-sourced after 7 years running as a sole cloud offering.

 InfluxData has released InfluxDB 3.6 for both Core and Enterprise, a  new version which incorporates AI and performance improvements. But, first of all what's the difference between Core and Enterprise?

https://www.i-programmer.info/news/80-java/18465-influxdb-36-released-with-ai-capabilities.html