The great AI debate: are skills the new agents?

About this episode

The episode discusses the rise of AI skills and the implications for the future of AI development.

In our final episode of 2025, we're taking a look back at what was dubbed 'the year of the agents' and peering into what 2026 might hold. The conversation kicks off with a deep dive into a potential paradigm shift: the rise of AI 'skills.' We explore Anthropic's big push for this new framework, contrasting it with existing tool-calling and MCP server approaches. Are skills just a more user-friendly way to package domain knowledge, or are they a fundamental change in how we'll build with AI? We break down the pros and cons, from context window preservation to ease of sharing in a marketplace. Beyond the theoretical, we get into the latest industry drama and developments. We tackle the heated online debate surrounding Claude Opus 4.5—is Anthropic secretly downgrading its flagship model, or are user expectations simply rising? We also cover the release of Google's impressively fast Gemini 3 Flash, a major NPM supply chain attack that compromised thousands of repositories, and the exciting new visual editor and debug mode features from Cursor that could change the front-end development workflow. Join us as we wrap up the year with the biggest stories and share our favorite resources…

People in this episode

Hosts: Bradley Bernard, Bennett Bernard

Topics covered

• AI skills
• Anthropic
• OpenAI
• Claude Opus 4.5
• Gemini 3 Flash
• NPM supply chain attack
• Cursor features

Keywords

• AI
• skills
• Anthropic
• Claude Opus 4.5
• Gemini 3 Flash
• NPM attack
• Cursor

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor

Products: Claude Opus 4.5, Gemini 3 Flash

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