The new versions of Instant Developer Cloud, Foundation, and Studio arrive simultaneously: introducing Instant Developer 26.0. It’s a coordinated step on multiple fronts: project loading speed, the team collaboration experience, performance, and the platform’s dialogue with AI agents. By the end of this article, you’ll have a clear idea of which new features will make a difference in your daily work.
Behind 26.0 are months of discussions with Instant Developer Studio Early Adopters, around fifty fixes from reports by developers working with our products, and intensive work on the artificial intelligence front.
We start with Cloud and close with artificial intelligence.
Instant Developer Cloud 26.0: faster and ready for agents
The first thing you notice is the speed: project loading is on average 25-30% faster, a difference you especially notice if you work on large codebases or open multiple projects in the same session.
On the collaboration front, in TeamWorks we implemented two long-requested improvements: when you open a pull request you directly see the list of included commits, and conflict management has a clearer user interface that reduces the steps needed to resolve them. Two collaboration workflow steps streamlined at the source.
Shadow UI continues to mature: we integrated a UI component similar to Ionic’s autocomplete and applied several fixes to existing components. If you’re building modern interfaces, you have a more consistent foundation to rely on.
There is also a new feature that carries strategic weight for the future of the platform: now you can expose classes as MCP servers. This means that an external AI agent can directly call what you build in Instant Developer Cloud through this open source protocol. Your classes become native MCP tools, directly exposed and callable from any compatible client.
Instant Developer Foundation 26.0: consolidating the core
This Foundation release is primarily about stability: we focused on the client frameworks, RD3 and Fluid, diving into the core mechanisms of the runtime. For anyone maintaining Foundation applications in production, this is the release to install to reduce update risk and free up time from corrective maintenance.
There is, however, a second reading, and it is the one that matters most if you look at the roadmap we shared at Instant Developer Day. The runtime consolidation you find in 26.0 is the same one that Studio inherits automatically: we are aligning the two codebases because very soon you will be able to import your Foundation projects into Studio without rewrites and without losing anything you have built. When that transition becomes fully viable, anyone coming from an updated, stable Foundation will find the path already cleared: same base, same behaviors, plus the productivity, performance, and AI tools that keep growing in Studio.
Instant Developer Studio 26.0: Community requests make their way into the IDE
In this release, Studio delivers the most visible results of the Early Adopter program: around fifty fixes from developers who are using the new generation of Foundation on real-world projects.
Manipulation performance has taken a clearly noticeable leap: object creation, drag & drop, validation, and compilation are faster and more responsive. This is the area where you spend the most time, and the area where you immediately feel the difference.
Then comes a feature that has been highly requested in the Community: reopen Studio and find your project in the exact state you left it in, including windows, views, and context. You save the time you used to spend every morning rebuilding your mental setup.
Still in the spirit of continuity, Studio now supports Foundation custom themes: if you’ve built your visual identity on the framework, you bring it with you, keeping everything you’ve already created.
Rounding out the picture is the arrival of app​.ai in beta inside Studio: the agentic framework that exits beta on Cloud with this release takes its first step into the desktop environment as well, ready to be tested on real projects.
Agents and AI in 26.0: app​.ai grows up, the IDE gets smart
Two new developments in the Instant Developer 26.0 release on the artificial intelligence front. app​.ai exits beta on Cloud and becomes a permanent part of the platform; the same agentic framework also comes to Studio, aligning intelligent application development features across both product lines.
In the webinar on April 15, we also introduced Instant Developer Agent: a native IDE agent that sees your project, queries the database, runs the application, checks the console, and tests what it has written. It goes far beyond the paradigm of an external tool that manipulates text files: it is the platform itself that becomes intelligent.
The next step is yours
Three simultaneous releases, each with its own focus: speed and agent support on Cloud, a more robust runtime on Foundation, and user experience and productivity on Studio. Which of the new features in the 26.0 releases will you try first on your next task? Update your version, open it on the project you’re currently working on, and put it to the test on today’s first task.
