The great AI debate: are skills the new agents?

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 to take into the new year.

Chapters:
00:00 End of Year and AI Music Licensing
02:43 Anthropic and OpenAI Introduce "Skills"
12:01 The Opus 4.5 Downgrade Controversy
19:14 Google's New Gemini 3 Flash Model
21:50 Recent Supply Chain Attack on Developers
26:39 Cursor's New Visual Editor and Debug Mode
31:11 Bookmarks: Building Skills and Email Triage
34:15 Wrapping Up 2025 and Holiday Plans

Links:
Suno AI: Ben mentions he used Suno AI, an AI music generation tool, to create the podcast's current theme song and pays a monthly subscription to maintain the commercial license.

Highcharts: A paid JavaScript charting library mentioned as an example of a tool with a commercial license that operates on an 'honor system,' similar to Suno AI.

Chart.js: The free, open-source alternative to Highcharts that Brad switched to for his project, Split My Expenses.

Cursor IDE: The AI-first code editor discussed for its new features, including a visual editor for front-end development and an automated debug mode.

Anthropic: Don't Build Agents, Build Skills Instead: Brad's bookmark: An Anthropic presentation on the AI Engineer YouTube channel titled 'Don't Build Agents, Build Skills Instead,' which argues for a shift in how developers leverage AI.

LangChain YouTube Channel: Ben's bookmark: A deep-dive video from LangChain's YouTube channel about building an agent for email triage, a practical application of AI for managing high-volume inboxes.

#AIPodcast #Anthropic #AISkills #SoftwareDevelopment #Cybersecurity #CursorIDE #AIAgents #GeminiAI #TechNews #LangChain