Xbox’s new chief exec, Asha Sharma, has only been in charge for a few months but things already seem like they might be changing for the better. Or at the very least, they might be getting cheaper. The Verge reported that the new Xbox CEO wrote a memo to employees addressing the current pricing of the Game Pass subscription service.

“Game Pass is central to gaming value on Xbox. It’s also clear that the current model isn’t the final one,” Sharma allegedly said. “Short term, Game Pass has become too expensive for players, so we need a better value equation. Long term, we will evolve Game Pass into a more flexible system which will take time to test and learn around.”

After Microsoft upped the price for Game Pass twice within 15 months, many of us certainly felt that the service had gotten too costly to keep. Xbox is still offering a wide range of titles on Game Pass; the April update is adding indies like Hades 2 and new Double Fine project Kiln alongside AAA hits like the remake of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. The Verge‘s sources suggested that the addition of the CoD franchise might have been a factor in some of the Game Pass price increases, since Microsoft would lose out on revenue by making the latest entries in the series available under the subscription.

It’s too early to say whether this memo from Sharma means Xbox is on the brink of a resurgence. And there are changes the company could make, like adding ever more complicated tiers, that would further hamper interest and uptake of Game Pass. But acknowledging the problem, even internally, is refreshing to see after so many baffling moves from Xbox in recent years.

• Top earners use AI tools to verify decisions before execution, not to create ideas
• Executives now prioritize accuracy and error prevention over speed in AI workflows
• Mid-level professionals rely less on AI for structured decision validation processes

The early narrative around artificial intelligence promised speed, scale, and unprecedented output.

A different picture is now emerging from recent survey data collected by Use.AI which found high-earning professionals are not racing to produce more content faster.

Despite indie darling Stardew Valley only being built by a single developer, you certainly wouldn’t know it by the amount of support the game has received since its launch in 2016. Regular updates, ports to other platforms, and even a fully-fledged online multiplayer mode make the game feel essentially endless. In fact, it’s one of Digital Trends’ top 50 video games of all time.

With Stardew Valley’s 1.6 update adding that multiplayer mode, fans have been begging for cross-platform play, as well as cross-progression. So, if you’re looking to recruit some fellow agriculture enthusiasts or some farming friends, read on to find out whether or not you can pull them from across console, PC, and mobile.

Is Stardew Valley cross-platform?

While developer ConcernedApe has worked in an awful lot of new content, at the time of writing (October 2025) Stardew Valley still does not offer cross-platform support, so you’ll need to play with friends on the same platform.

One reason for this could be that, since it launched in 2016, Stardew Valley predates the big cross-platform push spearheaded by the likes of Fortnite.

As a result, you’ll need to play on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Nintendo Switch, or PC with other players on the same system, but you can at least enjoy multiplayer thanks to the 1.6 update.

Back in 2018, one fan asked ConcernedApe if cross-platform play is likely to come to the farming sim.

“Unfortunately, there will not be crossplay. Apparently, the technical barriers are very high. It’s still something I really want to add and I promise to look into it more closely, but first priority is getting the update out there,” he responded, and the trail has gone quiet since.

As for cross-save, that’s not here either. You can’t save on your PC and pick up where you left off on your Xbox, for example, or jump between Nintendo Switch and PlayStation.

Arguably the closest you’ll get is using Steam’s Cloud Save functionality to play on PC and then pick up on a laptop or Steam Deck, but that won’t be a solution that suits everyone.

Haunted Chocolatier, the next game from ConcernedApe, is certainly looking promising, so here’s hoping cross-platform play and cross-save make it into that one at least. And hey, who knows? Maybe the dev will surprise us with crossplay and cross-save in the future.

Current status in 2026

The most relevant recent change is not full crossplay, but experimental multiplayer on mobile. Stardew Valley’s official mobile multiplayer guide confirms that Android and iOS now have a hidden experimental multiplayer feature tied to the 1.6 mobile release.

Which Stardew Valley platforms can play together?

• Windows, Mac, and Linux: Yes
• PlayStation with PlayStation: Yes
• Xbox with Xbox: Yes
• Switch with Switch: Yes
• PC with console: No
• PlayStation with Xbox or Switch: No
• Console with mobile: No standard crossplay
• Mobile with PC: Experimental only, with setup required

So if the goal is easy co-op with friends, the safest advice is still painfully boring: buy the game on the same platform.

What about Stardew Valley mobile multiplayer?

This is the one part of the answer that now needs nuance.

According to the official Stardew Valley mobile multiplayer guide, Android and iOS have a hidden experimental multiplayer mode. It isn’t enabled like standard multiplayer, and it comes with extra steps. Players need to be on the same game version, connect by IP, and often be on the same local network unless they’re using more advanced setup methods such as port forwarding. The official guide also warns that the feature is experimental and may have bugs or save-related issues.

That means mobile multiplayer exists, but it isn’t polished, full-featured crossplay. It’s closer to an official experimental workaround than a seamless “buy anywhere, play anywhere” system.

Does Stardew Valley have cross-save?

No. Stardew Valley still doesn’t offer broad, official cross-save or cross-progression across its major platform ecosystems. A save on Switch, for example, isn’t meant to flow neatly into Xbox, PlayStation, or PC in the way players now expect from fully connected live-service games.

Why doesn’t Stardew Valley have full crossplay?

Part of the answer is timing. Stardew Valley launched in 2016, long before full cross-platform support became an expected multiplayer feature for almost every popular co-op game. Multiplayer support expanded over time, and the current game supports up to eight players in multiplayer in supported environments, but that still doesn’t mean broad crossplay across every platform family.

In other words, Stardew Valley has multiplayer, but not the universal version modern players expect.

Stardew Valley cross-platform status in 2026

Stardew Valley still isn’t fully cross-platform in 2026. PC players can play together across Windows, Mac, and Linux. Console players generally need to stay within their own platform ecosystem. Mobile now has an official experimental multiplayer option, including the ability to connect in ways that blur the old boundaries a bit, but it’s still limited, hidden, and far from full crossplay.

If the goal is to start a farm with friends and avoid technical nonsense, everyone should still plan to buy the same version on the same platform. It’s not glamorous advice, but it beats discovering too late that your multiplayer plans were built on wishful thinking and turnips.

Presented by AWS

Autonomous agents are compressing software delivery timelines from weeks to days. The enterprises that scale agents safely will be the ones that build using spec-driven development.

There’s a moment in every technology shift where the early adopters stop being outliers and start being the baseline. We’re at that moment in software development, and most teams don’t realize it yet.

A year ago, vibe coding went viral. Non-developers and junior developers discovered they could build beyond their abilities with AI. It lowered the floor. It made prototyping much quicker, but it also introduced a surplus of slop. What the industry then needed was something that raised the ceiling — something that improved code quality and worked the way the most expert developers work. Spec-driven development did that. It laid the foundation for trustworthy autonomous coding agents.

Specs are the trust model for autonomous development

Most discussions of AI-generated code focus on whether AI can write code. The harder question is whether you can trust it. The answer runs directly through the spec.

Spec-driven development starts with a deceptively simple idea: before an AI agent writes a single line of code, it works from a structured, context-rich specification that defines what the system is supposed to do, what its properties are, and what “correct” actually means. That specification is an artifact the agent reasons against throughout the entire development process — fundamentally different from pre-agentic AI approaches of writing documentation after the fact.

Enterprise teams are building on this foundation. The Kiro IDE team used Kiro to build Kiro IDE — an agentic coding environment with native spec-driven development — cutting feature builds from two weeks to two days. An AWS engineering team completed an 18-month rearchitecture project, originally scoped for 30 developers, with six people in 76 days using Kiro. An Amazon.com engineering team rolled out “Add to Delivery” — a feature that lets shoppers add items after checkout — two months ahead of schedule by using Kiro and spec-driven development. Alexa+, Amazon Finance, Amazon Stores, AWS, Fire TV, Last Mile Delivery, Prime Video, and more all integrate spec-driven development as part of their build approaches.

That shift changes everything downstream.

Verifiable testing is what makes autonomous agents safe to run

The spec becomes an automated correctness engine. When a developer is generating 150 check-ins per week with AI assistance, no human can manually review that volume of code. Instead, code built against a concrete specification can be verified through property-based testing and neurosymbolic AI techniques that automatically generate hundreds of test cases derived directly from the spec, probing edge cases no human would think to write by hand. These tests prove that the code satisfies the spec’s defined properties, going well beyond hand-written test suites to provably correct behavior.

Verifiable testing enables the shift from one-shot programming to continuous autonomous development. Traditional AI-assisted development operates as a single shot: you give the agent a spec, the agent produces output, and the process ends. Today’s agents continuously correct themselves, feeding build and test failures back into their own reasoning, generating additional tests to probe their own output, and iterating until they produce something both functional and verifiable. The spec is the anchor that keeps that loop from drifting. Instead of developers constantly checking in to see if the agent is making the right decisions, the agent can check itself against the spec to make sure it is on the right path.

The autonomous agent of the future will write its own specs, using specifications as the mechanism for self-correction, for verification, for ensuring that what it produces matches the intended behavior of the system.

Multi-agent, autonomous, and running right now

The developers setting the pace today operate in a fundamentally different way. Developers spend significant time building their spec, as well as writing steering files used by the spec to make sure the agent knows what and how to build — more time than their agent may spend building the actual software. They run multiple agents in parallel to critique a problem from different perspectives, as well as run multiple specs, each written for a different component of the system they are building. They let agents run for hours, sometimes days. They use thousands of Kiro credits because the output justifies it.

A year ago, agents would lose context and fall apart after 20 minutes. Now, every week you can run them longer than the week before. Agentic capabilities have improved significantly in the last six months that genuinely complex problems are tractable. Newer LLMs are more token-efficient than the previous generation, so for the same spend, you get dramatically more done.

The challenge is that doing this well requires deep expertise. The tools, methodologies, and infrastructure exist, but orchestrating them is hard. The goal with Kiro is to bring these capabilities with deep expertise to every developer, not just the top one percent who’ve figured it out.

Infrastructure is catching up to ambition

Agents will be ten times more capable within a year. That’s the rate of improvement we’re seeing week over week.

The infrastructure to support that level of capability is converging at the same time. Agents are now running in the cloud rather than locally, executing in parallel at scale with secure, reliable communication between agent systems. Organizations can now run agentic workloads the way they’d run any enterprise-grade distributed system — with governance, cost controls, and reliability guarantees that serious software demands. Spec-driven development is the architecture of tomorrow’s autonomous systems.

Developers are no longer restricted by how they want to solve the problem. The developers who thrive in this world are the ones building that foundation now: using spec-driven development, prioritizing testability and verification from the start, working with agents as collaborators, and thinking in systems instead of syntax.

Deepak Singh is VP of Kiro at AWS.

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As someone who has reviewed a number of the best headphones, I have absolutely no reservations recommending the Bose QuietComfort Headphones at Amazon for $199 (was $359).

The Bose QuietComfort Headphones excel at noise-cancelation, but they’re far from a one-trick pony. With outstanding sound quality, a super-comfortable design, and an easy-to-use interface, they hit all the right notes across the board.

This limited-time deal sees the ANC masters drop back to the price we saw at Black Friday. Just note that this outstanding deal is only on the grey and pink colorways, although if you want the more traditional black alternative, then they’re only $19 more.

In our Bose QuietComfort Headphones review, we gave the popular audio product a very respectable four out of five stars. Our reviewer loved their “supreme comfort, fuss-free set-up and solid ANC”, so even though they’re not perfect, they’re still pretty impressive, especially at this reduced price.

If you’re often working in public places, then you’ll be pleased to hear that the ANC is second to none. There are also a couple of different audio modes, like ‘Quiet’ for improved noise cancelation and ‘Aware’ for more transparency. These can be toggled using the action button on the left earcup.

From a comfort point of view, Bose has opted for memory foam earcups wrapped in soft vegan leather and a well-padded headband. All of this equates to a seriously comfortable user experience.

At a sub-$200 price point, the Bose QuietComfort are some of the best noise-cancelling headphones and the best headphones. That’s why we’d highly recommend taking a proper look at this deal. It won’t be for everyone, though, and if that’s the case, check out all the latest Bose headphone deals and general headphone deals.