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Atlas Teams Up With Google Cloud & IRL Dev Events Incoming

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Dev List
August 18, 2025

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Hey there, here are the big updates in the coding world within the last week!

An AI scheduling assistant that lives up to the hype.

Skej is an AI scheduling assistant that works just like a human. You can CC Skej on any email, and watch it book all your meetings. It also handles scheduling, rescheduling, and event reminders.

Imagine life with a 24/7 assistant who responds so naturally, you’ll forget it’s AI.

  • Smart Scheduling
    Skej handles time zones and can scan booking links

  • Customizable
    Create assistants with their own names and personalities.

  • Flexible
    Connect to multiple calendars and email addresses.

  • Works Everywhere
    Write to Skej on email, text, WhatsApp, and Slack.

Whether you’re scheduling a quick team call or coordinating a sales pitch across the globe, Skej gets it done fast and effortlessly. You’ll never want to schedule a meeting yourself, ever again.

The best part? You can try Skej for free right now.

📰 Big Updates

  • 🚀 Microsoft Teases Visual Studio 18 with Deep AI Enhancements
    Microsoft is actively developing the 18th major version of Visual Studio, featuring near‑real‑time monthly updates, expanded AI and Copilot functionality, and a user-focused redesign sourced from community feedback. This marks one of the biggest IDE upgrades in years.

  • AI Tools May Actually Slow Down Expert Developers
    A controlled study by METR revealed that seasoned open-source developers using AI tools like Cursor Pro and Claude 3.5/3.7 took 19% longer to complete tasks—despite believing they were faster. Only 44% of AI suggestions were accepted, with much time spent prompting and cleaning results.

  • GitHub Spark Launches Natural-Language App Building
    With GitHub Spark, developers can build and deploy full-stack apps using plain-English prompts—powered by Claude Sonnet 4. This AI tool generates frontend, backend, AI features, and database logic automatically, offering a new paradigm for low-code development.

  • Atlassian Highlights Developer Experience Paradox
    While 99% of developers report AI tools save time—68% by more than 10 hours/week—organizational inefficiencies like poor documentation and workflows are eating up those gains. It’s a stark reminder: tools help, but infrastructure matters more.

What’s Shaping the Dev & AI Landscape?

  • AI Talent War Intensifies—Nine-Figure Offers Abound
    Meta and other giants are dangling colossal compensation packages to attract top-tier AI talent.

  • xAI Raises a Staggering $10B from Investors
    Elon Musk’s AI venture, xAI, secured $5B in equity and $5B in debt to scale its Grok platform and the massive Colossus supercomputer—already one of the most powerful globally.

  • 1X’s Redwood AI Powers the NEO Humanoid for Real-World Tasks
    Cut through the hype—Redwood, a vision-language transformer, enables 1X’s NEO humanoid to perform household tasks like navigation, grabbing objects, and door interaction safely and independently.

  • Users Enable Dev List Pro To Be First In Line For New Jobs 
    The Average Dev List Pro Member gets a job MONTHS sooner than standard applicants save precious time by upgrading to pro! Try it out for free here :)

What to Act On

  1. Begin Learning Visual Studio 18 & Prompt Engineering
    The future of IDEs is conversational—start exploring AI-driven workflows and code suggestions now.

  2. Use AI—But Vet It
    Don’t auto-accept AI suggestions. Treat them like junior dev outputs: verify for context, accuracy, and quality.

  3. Fix the Foundations
    Bridge the productivity gap by improving docs, automation, and cross-team processes so AI gains aren’t neutralized.

  4. Stay Alert to Industry Moves
    Follow compensation trends, infrastructure investments, and strategic hires—they’re often early signals of direction changes.

  5. Dive Into Robotics + LLM Fusion
    With models like Redwood enabling physical automation, understanding AI’s real-world deployment will be a major skill differentiator.

Events to Look Out For

Gamescom 2025

  • Date: (Aug 20–24)

  • Kicking off with "Opening Night Live" (Aug 19), Gamescom returns in Cologne with big developer showcases—new titles, demos, and hardware reveals.

Software Freedom Day

  • Date: September 20, 2025

  • Annual global celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), organized by local teams worldwide.

The AI Conference (San Francisco)

  • Dates: September 17–18, 2025

  • Mission Rock, San Francisco, CA

  • A vendor-neutral event diving deep into neural architectures, foundational models, applied AI, and alignment strategies

Heartland Developers Conference (HDC)

  • Dates: September 30 – October 1, 2025

  • Silicon Prairie, USA

  • Two-day developer event featuring keynotes, breakout sessions, and networking

Nvidia GTC 2025

  • Dates: October 27–29, 2025

  • Washington, D.C., USA (Walter E. Washington Convention Center)

  • Leading AI and GPU conference with a keynote by Jensen Huang and sessions on AI infrastructure, graphics, healthcare, ML, and more.

That’s all for this week! Let us know what you thought of this week’s recap!

— The Dev List Team