Claude Code & Coding Agents
Getting more out of coding agents: Claude Code skills, plugins, hooks and subagents, Cursor rules, Codex workflows and the tools engineers add to them.
Coding agents stopped being autocomplete once they could run commands, read a repository and load instructions on demand. The real gains now come from their extension points; a well-written skill or plugin changes what Claude Code does across every session, while a poorly scoped one fills the context window with instructions the task never needed.
These articles review the skills and plugins worth installing, explain how skills load and why they fail, and follow how OpenAI, Anthropic and others are opening their coding agents to each other.
Start here: Agent skills research · Memory vs agent skills · Agent skills (glossary)
Async Subagents: What the Orchestrator Keeps in Context, What Workers Hand Back, and What Should Outlive the Session
Async subagents let an orchestrator stay reachable while background workers run long tasks. What the orchestrator must keep about in-flight work so compaction cannot erase it, what a worker should hand back, when a follow-up should interrupt or enqueue, how results reach an orchestrator that is busy, idle or waiting on an approval, and which decisions and preferences should outlive the session, with LangChain Deep Agents, Claude Code and OpenAI behaviour as of 6 November 2026.
Context Compaction vs Retrieval: When Summarising a Long Agent Session Is Cheap, When Exact Lines Win, and What Neither Does Across Sessions
Compacting a 400,000-token Claude Opus 5.5 session costs about $0.08 of input when the prompt cache is warm and $1.60 to $2.00 when it has expired, at list prices as of 30 October 2026. Mainplane's measurement, Claude Code's and OpenAI's compaction docs, when to compact and when to start fresh and retrieve exact lines from the old session file, and the cross-session problem neither approach solves.
MCP Memory Server: What the Protocol Standardises, What It Leaves to the Backend, and How to Choose or Build One
An MCP memory server is an ordinary MCP server whose tools read and write memory. The 2026-07-28 spec standardises tool discovery, tool annotations, resources and subscriptions, stdio and Streamable HTTP, and OAuth 2.1 for remote servers. It says nothing about extraction, conflicting facts, scoping, deletion or staleness. What each side owns, what the official reference server does and where it stops, and how to choose or build one, read from the spec and each project's docs on 29 October 2026.
Multi-Agent Shared Memory: What Agents Should Share, How to Scope It, and How One Agent Poisons the Rest
Shared memory for a team of AI agents is a write-governance problem, not a storage problem. What to share and keep private, how it differs from orchestration state and handoffs, why scoping memory before retrieval beats one global history, how to scope it per agent, run, user and tenant, how to handle conflicting writes, what provenance to record, and what October 2026 studies from DeepMind, Meta and MIT Media Lab show about shared notes, poisoned notes and rejections that fall out of the context window.
Claude Code Memory, Codex Memory and Cursor Memory: What Each Coding Agent Remembers Between Sessions, Where It Lives, and How to Share It
Claude Code remembers through CLAUDE.md and auto memory (the first 200 lines or 25KB of MEMORY.md), Codex through AGENTS.md (32 KiB by default) and opt-in local Memories, and Cursor through Rules and AGENTS.md since it removed Memories in 2.1. Where each one stores memory, what each forgets, and how to make one memory persist and be shared across all three, read from each vendor's docs on 28 October 2026.
Prompt Caching in Coding Agents: How Claude Code, Codex CLI, OpenCode and Pi Keep the Prefix Stable
A coding agent sends its entire context again on every request, so prompt caching decides most of what a session costs: a 60-request session on Claude Sonnet 5.5 costs $12.99 with no caching and $1.31 when every request hits the cache.
How To Use Jev In Your AI Agent: A Map Of Decision Seams
Jev cannot write a single word, which is the reason to care about it, so the question worth asking is never whether it should be your agent but which decisions inside your agent it should own.
Best Claude Code Skills in 2026: 12 New Skills and What Changed
Important Claude Code skills shipped since February 2026, what each replaces, install commands, and the security problem that came with the marketplace.
Why OpenAI shipped an Official Plugin for Claude Code
OpenAI ships Codex plugin for ClaudeCode harness
Why Skills Are The New Microservices
Skills are how modular AI agents scale. Discover why skills replace monolithic prompts, how to architect composable agents, and the context management patterns that make them work at scale.
9 Essential Claude Skills for AI Engineers Building Production Agents + 1 Bonus Skill
Nine Claude skills for AI engineers building production agents, plus one bonus, re-checked on 29 October 2026: three February picks are gone and replaced, every install command is current, and Agent Skills now sits beside MCP at the Agentic AI Foundation.