
Welcome back. Cursor's homegrown coding model just overtook Anthropic's best. The AI startup launched Composer 2, a model specifically built for handling complex coding tasks. It reportedly beats Opus 4.6 in terms of speed while costing roughly ten percent of the price.
Also: A developer’s guide to Nano Banana 2, dive into 50 Claude Code hacks, and learn 14 rules from an OpenAI researcher to review AI code.
Today’s Insights
Powerful new updates and hacks for devs
How plugins turned coding agents into platforms
How to run Claude Code skills in isolation
Trending social posts, top repos, and more

TODAY IN PROGRAMMING
Cursor’s new model challenges Anthropic’s Opus 4.6: The AI code editor just dropped Composer 2, a custom-built model trained with reinforcement learning specifically for complex, long-term coding tasks. It delivers impressive performance, scoring 61.7 on TerminalBench 2.0 and 73.7 on SWE-bench Multilingual. While it trails slightly behind OpenAI's GPT-5.4, it outperforms Anthropic's Opus 4.6 on both benchmarks. Most notably, at just $0.50 per million input tokens, it costs about a tenth of its competitors.
Anthropic now lets you control Claude Code from Telegram and Discord: The AI lab just shipped Claude Code Channels, a new feature that connects active coding sessions to messaging apps through MCP plugins. Once you install the plugin and pair your account, you can send commands, run bash scripts, and get real-time results directly in your phone's chat window. It's a handy way to check on builds, respond to teammates, or issue quick commands without needing to be at your desk.
Google turns AI Studio into a full-stack app builder: The search giant launched a major upgrade to its vibe coding experience, powered by a new Antigravity coding agent. It now supports multiplayer apps, built-in Firebase integration for databases, and secure Google sign-in. You can also plug in external services like payment processors and Maps using your own API keys. The agent supports Next.js out of the box alongside React and Angular.

INSIGHT
How plugins turned coding agents into platforms

Source: The Code, Superhuman
Everybody shipped at once. Cursor and Claude Code both launched a plugin marketplace in February, the same month AWS released its open-source agent plugins. By bundling skills, MCP servers, hooks, and rules into installable units, these plugins fill a gap that coding agents have had since MCP shipped.
The missing packaging layer. MCP allowed agents to access external tools, but other essential components like skills, subagents, hooks, and rules lacked a unified format. These elements were scattered across various configuration files and prompts. Plugins bundle all of it into one installable unit that works across projects and teams.
Intercom is already there. Senior principal engineer Brian Scanlan recently explained how his team built 13 internal Claude Code plugins, totaling more than 100 skills. Creating individual plugins is easy, but the real challenge is building the infrastructure, like telemetry and automated reporting. This feedback loop is what allows plugins to evolve and improve on their own instead of remaining static.
Now build yours. While Claude Code and Cursor offer access to marketplaces, the real advantage lies in building internal plugins for your specific workflows, like code reviews and security protocols. Intercom has proven that this iterative approach of using real-world data to build new skills creates a more robust system. Plugins are the future of platform infrastructure, and the teams investing in them now will see the greatest long-term benefits.

IN THE KNOW
What’s trending on socials and headlines

Meme of the day.
PR Prep: An OpenAI researcher shared the 14 rules he feeds AI before every pull request to keep generated code clean and reviewable.
Mega Thread: 50 Claude Code tips in one thread. Hidden shortcuts, advanced agent teams, and a bunch of tricks you probably haven't tried yet.
Nano Banana 2: Gemini's newest image model can now pull real photos from Google Search and use them as context during generation. This dev guide has ready-to-use code snippets.
Token Budget: A clip of Jensen Huang telling engineers exactly how much they should be spending on AI tokens is going viral (1.6M views).
DevSheets: Stop Googling the same syntax twice. This site has searchable cheat sheets for 30+ technologies, including Git, Docker, React, and Go.

AI CODING HACK
How to run Claude Code skills in isolation

Source: X/lydiahallie
Every tool call within a skill typically lands in your main context window. For instance, if you run a research skill that reads 20 files, those intermediate calls will quickly clutter your conversation history. Lydia Hallie recently shared a simple two-line fix.
Just add “context: fork” and “agent” to your skill's YAML frontmatter to run it in an isolated subagent with its own dedicated context window.
# .claude/skills/deep-research/SKILL.md
---
name: deep-research
description: Research a topic thoroughly
context: fork
agent: Explore
---
Research $ARGUMENTS thoroughly:
1. Find relevant files using Glob and Grep
2. Read and analyze the code
3. Summarize findings with specific file referencesWhile your main session only sees the final summary, bypassing the dozens of individual file reads involved, the agent field determines exactly how the subagent operates.
For example, “Explore” is a read-only mode optimized for codebase navigation, though you can also use “Plan”, general-purpose, or any custom agent defined in “.claude/agents/”.

TOP & TRENDING RESOURCES
Top Tutorial
How to use Git worktrees: Multi-agent coding systems require true parallel execution across branches, a feature most setups currently lack. That's where worktrees come in. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to leverage worktrees to manage multiple tasks at the same time without the hassle of stashing or branch switching.
Top Repo
Agents of empires: This Rust-based terminal session manager for Linux and macOS is built on tmux to help you run multiple AI coding agents in parallel. By isolating each agent in its own session across different branches of your codebase, it streamlines complex workflows and keeps your environment secure.
Trending Paper
OpenClaw-RL: Current AI agents waste the valuable feedback hidden in everyday user replies and error messages. OpenClaw-RL solves this by capturing these real-time signals, transforming everyday interactions and corrections into a continuous training loop that improves the agent's performance.
Grow customers & revenue: Join companies like Google, IBM, and Datadog. Showcase your product to our 200K+ engineers and 100K+ followers on socials. Get in touch.
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Until next time — The Code team

