The machine is somewhere else
When you’re developing for manufacturing and fabrication, the code is on your PC, but the machine it controls is in a factory in another country. To add salt to the wound, the engineer who first wrote the module you’re now working on left two years ago. You’re left with zero context comments, no tome of documentation to fall back on, and commit…
Semiconductor Equipment Software: The C++ Stack Behind Control, Vision, and the Fab Host
August 19, 2026
The person who understood the code is gone
An all too familiar scene: Someone new takes over a legacy sensor-testing system, but the handover from the previous engineer was already over.
Roger Swann’s experience as a director for an electronics and manufacturing…
Search for “C++26 memory safety” and the results won’t agree with each other. One post declares C++ finally memory-safe. The next, titled something like “C++26 memory features won’t save you,” says nothing important changed.
In reality, no…
AI Coding Assistants for Large C++ Codebases: What Works, What Breaks, and How to Split the Work
July 13, 2026
AI Coding Assistants for Large C++ Codebases: What Works, What Breaks, and How to Split the Work
AI tools are everywhere. They’re in your phone, your car, your office, and it even made its way into software development. It’s being pushed as a do-it-all solution for coding, and in many cases it does solve, or the very least, speeds up the busywork. The benefit is real and it’s…
You cloned the repo on your first morning in your new team’s project. Twenty minutes later you’re looking at a solution with four hundred projects, a build that throws errors on a clean checkout, and a ticket that says a number is wrong on one screen. You…
AI coding tools are now part of the conversation in almost every software organization. Sometimes the push comes from developers experimenting on their own. Sometimes it comes from management asking teams to ship faster without increasing headcount. Either way, the…
How to Set Up a Fully Local AI in Visual Studio
May 19, 2026
VA Intelligence is Visual Assist’s local AI feature. It runs Gemma3 on your GPU through Ollama, both bundled and managed by Visual Assist itself. No API keys, no cloud round-trip, no telemetry pipeline waiting to be audited by your security team.
By the end of this guide you’ll have two features wired up inside Visual Studio: Explain with AI and Change Code with AI. If you’ve…
The moment the project opens
Welcome gamer! You’re excited to start coding games so you set up your Unreal Engine and finally got the source linked to your project… Once it opens you’re greeted with a sample project. It’s huge. And why are there red…
Reflection landed in C++26 last year, GCC trunk and the Bloomberg-maintained Clang fork already implement most of it. Many conference talks is making it sound like it’s the most important thing to happen to the language in a generation. If you ship production C++ on…
If you’ve been following Visual Assist for a while, you might have noticed something a little different about the last few releases. Alongside the navigation improvements, refactoring updates, and parser optimizations, there’s a quieter but important thread running through it all: VA Intelligence.
We introduced Explain with AI a few releases back, and with 2026.3 we just shipped Change…
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