[January 2026] Tech News Monthly Newsletter 💻🚀

Welcome to the 1st issue of Tech News Monthly!

The quick version: I curate and share the most important articles, news, resources, podcasts, and videos from the world of tech.

Instead of consuming a bunch of news and articles every day, all you have to do is read this short newsletter every month to stay up to date with the industry!

Alright, let's not waste any valuable time and jump right into this month's updates.

Here's what happened Janaury 2026 in our industry

2025: The year in LLMs 🐣

Everything you want to know about the LLM industry and what happened in 2025. This is a great overview everyone should read to stay up to date. It was the year of "reasoning".

Creator of Claude Code ✍️

The internet went crazy over the Cloude Code creator's tweet. They shared how they personally use Claude and it's pretty intense...

Ps this is how to code your own Claude Code in 200 lines of code.

AI Getting Worse? 💎

An interesting article discussing whether the AI coding assistants are getting worse. What do you think?

Databases in 2025 🤑

If you're a databse nerd, this is a good overview of all the developments in the database world. It might not be as sexy as LLMs, but there is a lot of money in this established indsutry.

The Next 2 Years 🧠

The software industry sits at a strange inflection point. AI coding has evolved from autocomplete on steroids to agents that can autonomously execute development tasks. The economic boom that fueled tech’s hiring spree has given way to an efficiency mandate: companies now often favor profitability over growth, experienced hires over fresh graduates, and smaller teams armed with better tools. So what happens in the next 2 years?

Engineering Manager Bible 👑

You may not be interested in becoming a manager, but you should still read this to understand how to manage people well instead of poorly (a skill that people often overlook).

Things I’ve learned in my 10 years as an engineering manager

Something to Think About 🧨

LLM agent capabilities (Claude & Codex especially) have crossed some kind of threshold of coherence around December 2025 and caused a phase shift in software engineering and closely related. The intelligence part suddenly feels quite a bit ahead of all the rest of it - integrations (tools, knowledge), the necessity for new organizational workflows, processes, diffusion more generally. 2026 is going to be a high energy year as the industry metabolizes the new capability. Read the full thought here.

A Reminder That You Need 🪄

This is a friendly reminder that you need to read. Don't be lazy.

News Around the World 🗺

• Stackoverflow is pretty much dead.

• I hope this catches on: Vietnam bans unskippable ads.

Big Tech News aka AI News 🏢

• After ChatGPT dominated the early AI market, Google staged a comeback with powerful AI model; biggest search-engine overhaul in years. This is How Google Got Its Groove Back and Edged Ahead of OpenAI

• OpenAI announced ChatGPT Health: A dedicated experience in ChatGPT designed for health and wellness.

• Claude released Cowork. Giving access to files on your computer, can't be a good idea right?

• Huge news, and not a great one for OpenAI: Apple picks Google's Gemini to run AI-powered Siri coming this year

• The Astro Technology Company — the company behind the Astro web framework — is bought out by Cloudflare, which is a pretty out of nowhere news.

• OpenAI is getting ready to put ads in their ChatGPT outputs.

• A big win for the open source LLM community: Qwen3-TTS Family is Now Open Sourced: Voice Design, Clone, and Generation!

• Google announced the new Project Genie: an experimental research prototype that lets you create and explore worlds.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• An insane world map of current ships floating.

• Can you make the spaceship fly?

• ASCII clouds. Pretty.

• CSS optical illusions.

Best Resource of the Month ✅

Although we don’t deserve it, and have done nothing to merit it, we have been offered a glorious ride on this planet, if only we accept it. To receive the gift requires the same humble position a hitchhiker gets into when he stands shivering on the side of the empty highway, cardboard sign flapping in the cold wind, and says, “How will the miracle happen today?”

PSA: stop reading garbage on reddit and falling in a negativity spiral.

Trick of the Month 🌗

• The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible. HA!

• Not sure if this is better than just telling someone to keep it down...

• A macOS app that blurs your screen when you slouch. Uses Vision framework for real-time posture detection.

Thanks for reading!

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See you next month! ❤️

By the way, I teach people how to code and get hired in the most efficient way possible as an Instructor at the Zero To Mastery Academy. You can see a few of our most popular courses below or see all ZTM courses here.