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The latest News and Information on Continuous Integration and Development, and related technologies.

MCP vs API: How they work together and when to use each

Summary: An API defines how software interacts with a service. MCP defines a standard way for AI applications to discover and invoke tools exposed by a service. They usually work together: an MCP server can sit in front of APIs you already run, turning low-level operations into capabilities an agent can find and use at runtime. Your API may already expose everything an AI agent needs. The harder problem is helping the agent figure out which operations matter for the task it has been given.

Don't Break the Agent: Lessons in Token Optimization

This one is for the curious souls who wonder how somebody actually builds a harness optimizer — and, more to the point, how they know it works. When we launched JFrog Boost into public preview, we told the story of the bill that broke us and the 100 billion tokens we clawed back across JFrog R&D. What that post didn’t cover is the question that consumed most of our engineering time: how do you measure any of this?

JFrog Artifactory Now Integrates Natively with Artifact Registry in Google Cloud

Teams running containerized workloads on Google Cloud have long relied on JFrog as their single source of truth for container images. The missing piece has been getting Google Cloud’s own runtime services — like Cloud Run and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) — to pull directly from JFrog for every container image pull. I’m happy to say that the gap is now closed. Artifact Registry in Google Cloud has introduced a new repository mode called Connector that addresses this requirement.

Argo CD Deployment Failed: AI SRE Agent AURA Finds and Fixes It

A deployment fails validation and the sync stops. Argo CD hands the report to AURA, which finds the wrong version, fixes it, and re-runs the sync. Normally, a failed sync means a person opens the application, reads the hook logs, and works out which value is wrong. Here, the sync fail hook sends AURA a short failure report and an incident ID over the agent-to-agent protocol, then exits. It does not say how to investigate or what to change.

AGENTS.md vs. skills: How to steer a coding agent

Every team adopting coding agents hits the same question early: where do you put the instructions that tell the agent how your codebase actually works? Two answers dominate the conversation right now. One is AGENTS.md, a plain markdown file at the root of your repo. The other is skills, packaged instruction sets an agent loads on demand. Most of the debate treats this as a formatting decision. It isn’t.

Starting your engineering career in the AI era: 6 takeaways for junior developers

“We don’t need junior engineers anymore” has become one of those lines people repeat because it sounds obvious. The AI writes the code, so why pay someone to learn how to write it? On the latest Confident Commit podcast, Rob Zuber makes the case that this take is exactly backwards.

DevOps Cost of Ignoring Bad Bots on Your Infrastructure

A traffic spike used to mean good news. Now, it's just as likely to mean a scraper found your pricing page or a credential-stuffing script started hammering your login endpoint at 3 a.m. Most teams treat this as a security problem and hand it off accordingly. That's a mistake, because by the time it reaches security, it has already cost engineering time, compute budget, and a fair amount of sleep.

Introducing the redesigned deployments experience

You shouldn’t have to hunt through a cluttered dashboard to understand where your code is deployed. The Deployments page is where teams turn for a quick answer: what is in test, what is in staging, what reached production, and what needs attention right now. The older page made that harder than it needed to be. Our new Pipelines Deployments page makes it easier to scan, filter, and act on.