Claude Code Tips and "Wild" 2026 Predictions

And other news in AI Coding: January 6, 2026

Ok, it seems like over Christmas break, a lot of people tried Opus 4.5 and something fundamentally changed in dev society. People quickly went from reviewing every step of AI agent, to firing multiple agents without even looking at the final code result.

Also, now it’s pretty clear to me that devs focus on Claude Code as the main AI tool. Alternatives like Codex, Cursor and others receive like 10x less raving on social media combined. So, I will probably focus on that as well and dive deeper into best practices of using Claude Code in my articles.

Reading AI coding tweets, I do feel overwhelmed by the amount of tools and methodologies, but this is where my weekly newsletter should help the sanity for both you and me :)

So, I will try to re-cap the main “trending” things you need to know about AI Coding.

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For Paid Substack Members

From this week, I wanna publish one EXTRA piece of content for Premium members.

So here’s one for this week: My AI Guidelines for Laravel/PHP and Filament v4

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My YouTube Videos

• Claude Code: Plan Mode “Trick” for Bigger Feature/Project Spec (7 min)

• Claude Code: in Terminal, in Cursor IDE, or in VS Code Extension? (18 mins)

• The Future (I think) of CLAUDE.md and Other Guidelines (8 mins)

• [SHORT] Claude Code: CLAUDE.md “Secret Word” Trick

• [SHORT] Claude Code: Search Past Prompts

• [SHORT] Claude Code: Prompt Stashing to Quickly Run Another Prompt

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AI Coding News, Tips, and Opinions

• Boris, creator of Claude Code, shared his own setup in a tweet that went absolutely viral.

• Ralph Wiggum Claude Code plugin is a new “hot” thing, getting increasingly viral on social media.

• Community is suspicious: Did Anthropic use the 2× event to quietly reduce usage limits?

• Reddit post with praise from the community: I condensed 8 years of product design experience into a Claude skill, the results are impressive

• If you’re into yearly reviews, a good one from Simon Willison: 2025: The year in LLMs

• Reminder: Claude Code isn’t just for coding. Pietro on X: “I fed it my raw DNA data from an ancestry test and used it to find health related genes I should keep an eye on.”

• Nader on X posted that he re-created TypeForm in 35 minutes with Opus 4.5. This is another proof of possibilities for coding, but also it’s showing that code is NOT the reason for success of 100B companies like TypeForm. Otherwise, all vibe-coders would be millionaires by now. I’m planning to shoot a video about it.

• Another similar story: Noam vibecoded an open-source poker river solver with Codex and Claude Code. It looked good on the surface, but AI would make mistakes and encounter bugs in domain knowlegde a lot. Another angle for successful product: you need to be a DOMAIN expert. That’s your moat against AI agents who can “just” write code.

• Prediction by Phillipp on X: If 2025 was beginning of agents, 2026 will be around Agent Harnesses.

• Another prediction by Burkov on X: The new software development paradigm: the purity of the codebase is no longer the holy cow protected by angry senior devs (so poetically phrased).

• Jaana from Google shared that Claude Code helped her to achieve result, which kinda shocked the community and quickly became a “I’m not joking and it isn’t funny“ meme.

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