The world may be moving past the need for passwords—slowly—but that doesn’t mean that the old ways are disappearing in a flash.

At password and identity management company 1Password, that means focusing on both the past and the future. Co-CEO Jeff Shiner told IT Brew at last month’s RSAC conference that the ramifications of the Covid-19 pandemic’s effect on identity access management (IAM) can’t be understated; when it comes to bring-your-own-device, for example, there are costs that align with the productivity benefits.

“They are being required to give us those options if they want to continue to grow, and that is of paramount importance to them, and now what they also are recognizing is in order to do that, in order to give that flexibility to their employees, they need to give their employees some simple ways and simple tools that allow them to do so in a secure way,” Shiner said.

The sequel. Extended access management, 1Password’s answer to the need for a more robust and flexible identity suite, has entered “part two” of its development, the company’s VP of Product Jason Meller told us. Single sign-on (SSO) solutions are the key to the future, Meller said, and that’s the challenge.

When will the password pass on?—EH

An agentic web could be coming soon to a computer near you.

Agentic AI took center stage at Microsoft’s annual Build developer conference last week as the tech giant continues to pave a path toward an agent-powered future.

During the conference, which took place May 19–22 in Seattle, the tech giant unveiled more than 50 announcements related to its commitment to improving the developer workflows, including:

• A GitHub Copilot AI coding agent that is capable of fixing bugs, adding features, and other “low-to-medium complexity tasks.”
• A new open project, dubbed NLWeb, that will make it easier to turn websites into AI-powered apps and “play a similar role to HTML in the emerging agentic web.”
• The addition of xAI’s Grok 3 models to the Azure AI Foundry platform.

In a blog post highlighting some of its recent announcements, Microsoft said it was in the process of turning its vision of an agentic web into reality.

Microsoft has a new vision for the web.—BM

Back in the ’90s, Rob Brown, 48, now director of foundation engineering at employee-experience platform Workleap, wasn’t bagging groceries. He was coding them.

The teenage software engineer in training was working part-time for a supermarket in Ontario, Canada, when he created an inventory management system. Brown used a programming language called Turing, a general-purpose language developed in 1982, to bring his “little pet project” to life.

“That was almost a commercial application in my young imagination,” Brown told us.

If he had to do that kind of app today, he said, he might use a three-tier web-architecture structure, backed by a cloud service, and then integrate a large language model (LLM) to help managers or customers with questions.

On his desk today, Brown keeps a Mac mini for running LLMs locally. With loaded tools like Transformer Lab, he is experimenting with using Workleap’s post-mortem transcript calls as training data for determining the root causes of customer-impacting incidents. Whether digitally organizing grocery ingredients or client headaches, Brown remains curious and wants to apply his skills to the technology of the moment.

“That passion to actually keep up and reapply those skills and to continually reinvent ourselves is important,” Brown said.

Why veteran developers are changing with the times.—BH