Hey there!
Summary of this email:
- What you need to know about AI for programming (+ course published on Codely Pro)
- Top tech and programming news of the week
- The tech joke of the week
✨ What you need to know about AI for programming
Every week the way we code changes.
Since agentic programming became a thing:
- January 2025: Cursor adds the Agents sidebar.
- January 2025: Cursor adds support for cursor rules.
- February 2025: Cursor adds MCP support.
- March 2025: Claude Code launches plan mode.
- April 2025: Claude Code launches slash commands.
- June 2025: OpenAI + Sourcegraph + Google propose the AGENTS.md standard.
- October 2025: Claude launches skills.
- October 2025: Claude launches plugins.
- November 2025: Cursor adds a native browser for agentic changes.
- November 2025: Claude Code changes how plan mode works internally to use subagents.
- January 2026: The Ralph AI Loop technique goes viral.
And these are just some of the most relevant milestones.
Every week there are things that may seem smaller, like Claude Code changing the default context from 200k to 1M for the same price, but they affect how we use agents.
That said, we bring good news: The fundamentals for programming with AI haven't changed since AGENTS.md was standardized.
That's why, after more than 11 editions of the AI for Programming Workshop, we believe it's time to publish a new course: Agentic Programming with AI: Practical Fundamentals
In this course:
- 👌 You'll learn to use agents in the most efficient way.
- 🤖 You'll understand how they work under the hood.
- 🔥 Skills vs MCPs vs Agents vs Doc
With all this you'll be able to build a great Agent Harness and make better use of Progressive Disclosure.
All with practical examples you can try as we go.
In the course we use various agentic tools (Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code + Copilot, Codex, Junie…) to show that the tool is secondary when the foundations are solid.
On top of that, we've applied everything we learned from teaching the Workshop to make this a top-notch course.
We hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed building it. 😊
🗞️ Top tech and programming news of the week
ChatGPT is about to change and probably for the worse.
In a podcast, Nick Turley, the Head of ChatGPT, said their pricing model doesn't make sense. And that the unlimited part of the subscription has to go.
He mentioned that ChatGPT was launched as an experiment and they planned to shut it down after a month, but due to its success, they couldn't.
To handle the load, they quickly created a subscription ($20/month).
And now, as they prepare to go public, they've realized they're still losing a lot of money with such a low subscription price.
He says AI will be like electricity: you'll pay based on how much you use. This means we'll probably end up paying per token (same price as the API), and everything will get more expensive.
On another note, OpenAI had a contract where their models could only be served on Azure. But with a new deal with Amazon, that might change. Microsoft is not happy about it and is considering suing OpenAI.
Also this week, Stripe introduced a new protocol for payments between agents: "Machine Payments Protocol".
And there's still drama with Cursor's pricing.
With all this, our Café con Codely is going to be a packed one.
Tomorrow live at 9 CET all these news and more. We'll be waiting for you on our YouTube or Twitch!
And since you've made it to this part of the newsletter, here's the joke of the week, which I know you were waiting for:
Why is Redis the most respected database? - Because it has a lot of cache! 😂 😂 😂
Cheers!