As AI agents connect to more services—Slack, GitHub, Jira, MCP servers—tool libraries grow rapidly. A typical multi-server setup can easily have 50+ tools consuming 55,000+ tokens before any conversation starts. Worse, tool selection accuracy degrades when models face 30+ similarly-named tools.

The Tool Search Tool pattern, pioneered by Anthropic, addresses this: instead of loading all tool definitions upfront, the model discovers tools on-demand. It receives only a search tool initially, queries for capabilities when needed, and gets relevant tool definitions expanded into context. This achieves significant token savings while…

On behalf of the tools team, it is my pleasure to announce the release of the Spring Tools 5.0. This new major release comes with several new features and updates:

• Spring Tools 5 supports Spring Framework 7, Spring Boot 4, Spring Data 2025.1, and more: including extensive support for the new API versioning, functional bean registration, JSpecify checks, and AOT generated data repositories

• Spring Tools is ready for the AI era of coding: it supports and integrates with Cursor, Copilot for Visual Studio Code as well as Copilot for Eclipse

• A completely new logical project structure view around stereotypes: support for pre-defined and custom stereotypes as well as grouping, giving you a unique Spring specific perspective of your project - available in Visual Studio Code, Cursor, and Eclipse

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On behalf of the team and all contributors, I am pleased to announce that Spring Shell 4.0.0-M2 is now available on Maven Central!

What's new?

This second milestone release continues our efforts toward a modern version of Spring Shell, aligned with the rest of the Spring portfolio.

This milestone includes several bug fixes and improvements based on the feedback we received after the 4.0.0-M1 release.

Major changes include:

• Upgrade to Spring Framework 7.0 GA and Spring Boot 4.0 GA
• Migrate nullability annotations and checks to jSpecify
• Improve project modularity to streamline dependencies
• Improve command programming model and APIs
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Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! I am in lovely New Jersey, the Garden State, as I write this and I spent most of the last week in New Orleans. It's been a busy week in the Spring community and beyond and so you know what that means? There's a ton of stuff to look into! Let's dive right into it!

• Spring gRPC 1.0.0 is now GA! Huzzah! Hooray!
• Want to learn more about the new release direct from the Spring team? Join them, live, for this webinar on the 11th.
• Good news, everybody, Spring Shell 4.0.0-M2 is available now!.
• Spring AI 1.1.1 is available now.
• I really enjoyed this discussion with fellow Spring Developer Advocate Dan Vega on his new book The Fundamentals of Software Engineering, and you can too.
• Did you see this amazing Kotlin DSL for HTMX, called KHTMX?
• Speaking of Kotlin, have you started your journey with this amazing language? Check out this guide on the Spring portal.
• While not strictly speaking related to Spring, I think this article on Idempotency Keys - a very useful design philosophy and pattern - by fellow Java Champion Gunnar Morling is well-worth a read if you care about building reliable distributed systems architectures…

On behalf of the Spring AI team, I'm pleased to announce the availability of Spring AI 1.1.1!

This release brings 13 new features, 16 bug fixes, and important dependency updates including security patches. Thanks to the community contributors who helped make this release possible.

Release Summary

Spring AI 1.1.1 includes:

• 13 new features expanding capabilities across model providers
• 16 bug fixes for improved stability
• 3 documentation improvements
• 5 dependency upgrades including 2 CVE security fixes

(GitHub Release)

OpenAI Java SDK Integration

Thanks to Julien Dubois (@jdubois) from Microsoft…

Hi, Spring fans! I'm so excited to chat with fellow Spring developer advocate Dan Vega about his new book, Fundamentals of Software Engineering

On behalf of the team and everyone who has contributed, I'm happy to announce that Spring gRPC 1.0.0 has been released and is now generally available from Maven Central.

Highlights of the release include:

• Support for Spring Boot 4 / Spring Framework 7
• Embracing Java 25 (as the latest LTS) while retaining a Java 17 baseline
• Comprehensive null safety through JSpecify

Please see the release notes for more details and the Spring gRPC Next Steps for 1.0.0 blog for upgrade instructions.

We want to take this opportunity to again thank all our users and contributors.

Project Page | GitHub | Issues

There is no doubt that AI-based coding assistants are already or will be widely used by developers and within organizations. While the overall outlook is pretty certain, the exact way when and how to use those tools might vary, ranging from extensions for existing IDEs (e.g. Copilot for Visual Studio Code) to entirely AI-focused environments (e.g. Cursor) or pure command-line interfaces (e.g. Claude Code).

The upcoming new major version 5 of the Spring Tools is ready for this new era in two different dimensions:

• we make sure that you can install and use the Spring Tools in as many AI-extended or AI-focused environments as possible, enhancing your AI-powered developer experience with the traditional Spring support that the Spring Tools bring to the table (ranging from specific validations, quick fixes, quick navigation and understanding, and more).
• we integrate the Spring Tools with the surrounding AI-powered environment to improve the AI coding experience itself.
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Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring. By mistake, I inadvertently published older content in this installment, then tried to fix it and ended up re-publishing the same content. And, what's worse, I somehow ended up deleting the draft I had written for this installment — the one I intended to copy in to override the bad content. Ugh. A comedy of errors. Anyway, this is a lesson in why you should make sure you get enough sleep. And this is why I am now re-writing the same content again!

So, without any further ado, here finally is this week's roundup!

• this is an exciting look at the next generation of the Spring Tools projects
• in last week's installment of A Bootiful Podcast, I talked to Spring and Java community legend Simon Martinelli
• Spring Cloud 2025.1.0 has been released
• even more awesome stuff on the Spring Data AOT repository support
• I love this article from Spring Modulith founder Oliver Drotbohm on rethinking Spring Application Integration Testing
• How cool is this? Spring AI is at AWS re:Invent!
• want to learn more about the amazing new stuff in Spring Framework 7 and Spring Boot 4?…