Personal messages to the AI community The AI Engineering Skills Map In Detail — Using Coding Agents: How to Use Coding Agents Effectively from Planning to Execution and Monitoring A key AI engineering skill is using coding agents. Your skill at steering them both to write code and to carry out non-code tasks, such as analyzing data or managing system operations, allows you to get a lot more done. The AI Engineering Skills Map In Detail — Software Engineering Fundamentals: Why Software Fundamentals Remain Essential for AI Developers How have software engineering fundamentals changed with agentic coding? The AI Engineering Skills Map In Detail — Building and Deploying AI Applications: What You Need to Know to Make AI Applications Work in Real Life I previously wrote about our AI Engineering Skills Map, with the highest level skills being (i) Building and deploying AI applications, (ii) Software engineering fundamentals, (iii) Using coding agents, and (iv) Shaping the build. In this letter, I will flesh out the first of them. The AI Engineering Skills Map: Andrew Ng and DeepLearning.AI Present the Essential Skills Every AI Engineer Needs in 2026 I am delighted to present The AI Engineering Skills Map. AI allows us to build software very differently today than in 2022, and everyone with the skills to take advantage of this shift has numerous exciting project and job opportunities. What Comes After Tokenmaxxing?: How to avoid getting locked in to just one AI provider I’m glad the idea of “tokenmaxxing” — that individuals and companies should use as many tokens as possible to boost productivity — is finally dying out. Open Models, Open Harnesses, Open Security: What we did when Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol refused our security requests My team recently had our own version of Hugging Face’s experience when closed models failed to defend the company following an accidental cyberattack from OpenAI, leading Hugging Face to use the open weight GLM 5.2 instead. When Guardrails Go Wrong: After a closed model went amok on a key vendor's system, an open weight model helped save the day A few frontier labs have tried to tell a story of open models being dangerous because they can be used to launch cyberattacks, and of their “safe” proprietary models with strong guardrails being there to defend us. AI Rewards Generalists Who Can Build New Skills: With AI assistance, full-stack engineers are joined by full-stack recruiters, full-cycle marketers, and more. As AI increasingly automates coding, it frees up developers to spend time on high-level software development tasks traditionally reserved for senior engineers, like deciding on technical architecture and participating in scoping product requirements.

Make All Your Tokens (and Your Brainwork) Count: Agentic loop coding works until it fulfills a goal. Here's an agentic way to iterate on your goals to find the right one. The key idea of agentic coding loops is to have an agent keep working until it satisfies a condition, such as achieving a product specification. How We Decide What Courses to Teach: The AI world is full of hype and sales pitches. DeepLearning.AI focuses on most important tools and techniques in ways you can apply to any AI vendor’s ecosystem. The AI world has become incredibly noisy. Social media, traditional media, and an army of marketers produce a cacophony of hype and content that are often secretly sales pitches for their products. Three Key Loops for Building Great Software AI-assisted agentic coding reinforces iterative software development. These three loops can guide development and help you decide what to build. Open Platforms Beat Power Plays Over the last two weeks, both the U.S. Government and Anthropic took significant actions that demonstrated their power to control access to AI by restricting what others can do with frontier models. Agents on the Desktop If you haven’t already, I encourage you to experiment with using AI agents not just to chat but to actually do work for you on your desktop. AI Regulations Must Balance Innovation and Risk There have been intense efforts over the past few years to lobby governments to pass AI laws for regulatory capture or to suppress open source. Forward Deployed Engineers and the Future of AI Engineering One of the new, buzzy jobs in Silicon Valley is the AI Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), an engineer who is embedded within a client organization to help customize solutions, such as building and tuning agentic workflows that suit the client’s particular needs. Subscribe to The Batch Stay updated with weekly AI News and Insights delivered to your inbox Choose Your Plan