Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.
Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.
Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.
AgentCore delivers an enterprise-grade infrastructure and operations layer for deploying and managing AI agents at scale, with a few wrinkles.
Jules performs better than Gemini CLI despite using the same model, and more like Claude Code and OpenAI Codex.
Codex gives software developers a first-rate coding agent in their terminal and their IDE, along with the ability to delegate background tasks to agents in the cloud.
Artificial intelligence has taken many forms over the years and is still evolving. Will machines soon surpass human knowledge and understanding?
Qwen Code’s Qwen3-Coder model doesn’t seem as good as its benchmark scores imply, but the tools are free and the usage limits are generous.
Nvidia’s NeMo Retriever models and RAG pipeline make quick work of ingesting PDFs and generating reports based on them. Chalk one up for the plan-reflect-refine architecture.
AI-powered coding agents are now real and usable, if not without their foibles. Here’s a brief look at the top prospects.
Gemini CLI and its gemini-2.5-pro model don’t quite match Claude Code or Solver, but they can get you pretty far without paying for a subscription or for usage.