5 Quick Links for Devs: Week 16, 2026

Programming Still Sucks

This one really cuts to the bone. It's a beautifully written post that sidesteps the discourse of the day and speaks to you on a personal level, as a developer. Programming is hard, working in large organizations is hard, and often 'progress' is made for the sake of spreadsheets and bottom lines, not so we can bask in the glow of artisanal hand-crafted code. Institutional knowledge and goodwill often resides in the minds of unsung heroes, and no LLM that we know of is going to save us when that goodwill walks (or is pushed) out the door. A great read. 
Related: Programming Sucks

Introducing Claude Design by Anthropic Labs

6 months ago I would have been extremely excited to see a new design tool released by Anthropic, but I have to say that they have lost a lot of credibility in my eyes over the past few months, with chaotic restrictions, pricing policies and general nastiness. They have also fallen into a habit of gaslighting users, who report diminished capabilities and are told that nothing is changed, before inevitably a month later Anthropic reports a change that they made weeks earlier that was leading to.. diminished capabilities.

Rant over, I haven't had a chance to play with this yet.

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic Coding Power, Now Open to All

A new open-source darling has hit the scene, with glowing reviews and favourable comparisons with the big league frontier models. OS models have started really improving and their value proposition in relation to lock-in / walled garden models is becoming increasingly attractive, so I'm looking forward to taking this for a spin.

Codex for (almost) everything

Following in the footsteps of becoming an 'everything agent' ala OpenClaw, Codex (Mac) has been updated to include in-app browsing, image generation, and a million plugins to integrate with 3rd party tools like Atlassian, Gitlab, Microsoft Suite, etc.