[August 2026] Tech News Monthly Newsletter 💻🚀

Welcome to the 8th issue of Tech News Monthly! If you missed the previous months, you can check out the previous issues of Tech News Monthly here.

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 once a month to stay up to date with the tech industry!

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

Here's what happened in August 2026 in our industry... 100% human written every month:

Quick Important Announcement 😢

Unless we get more readers for this newsletter, this will be my last monthly. If you love this newsletter and you would like me to keep writing these, share it with your friends. If this newsletter won't increase email subscribers in 1 month it will be the end of it. Why? This monthly update takes up a lot of my time as I read articles every day to try and find the best resources for you. It's getting to the point that I need to make sure this time investment makes sense for me as I put at least 50+ hours each month into this newsletter.

Hope it doesn't have to end but we will see how the numbers are doing this month and make a decision.. SO SHARE WITH YOUR FRIENDS!

LLMs Reward Expertise 🤖

A great read to start of this month's newsletter. AI will not guide your hand....well it will, but that hand will not be very good. An expert guiding AI is where the true value is.

If I Was 17... 👨‍🎤

Paul Graham had an interesting tweet:

Someone asked what I'd do if I were 17. I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch, and then train ones as powerful as I could with whatever hardware I could get access to.

Everyone had a lot of opinion on this. What do you think?

Big Tech News aka AI News 🏢

• The story this month is the development of open Chinese AI models that are commoditizing the space. More competition is great and there were some big announcement like the DeepSeek v4 (Pro and Flash), Qwen 3.8 27B. I liked this comment from a hackernews user:

The beauty of intelligence at this cost (even if it's not SOTA) is that it opens a whole bunch of new use cases. Test failure in CI? Have the bot automatically propose a fix, its cheap enough that you can discard it w/h issues. Test coverage too low? Auto generate tests on CI for every pull-requests! Monitoring server logs, continuous security audits and investigating every received exception now becomes possible.

• OpenAI is feeling the heat of these cheaper models: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter

• Meta is back to having a good open model: Muse Glimmer. Although this comes from the "evil" meta, any open model is a good thing for consumers. Can't deny that this is a good thing. Meta is back in the game after a bit of hiatus. But you know, they are still Meta-ing.

• xAI released Grok 4.6 and Grok Bot AI teammates you can give real work to. Bots can sign in to your tools, use them just like you do, and come back with finished work. I wouldn't touch this with a ten foot pole.

• Google is keeping pace and costs down with Gemini 3.7 Flash

• OpenRouter is joining Stripe for $7billion. I think this is a really smart move by Stripe.

• The biggest news this month is this though: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• Mario meets Pareto

• NASA figured out how to keep its 48-year-old Voyager 2 probe running for yet another year

• Such a cool concept: ride along with any flight

• I want this duck

Best Resource of the Month ✅

The manifestation of my imposter syndrome, for me and today, is what does it mean to be a software engineer. There’s a lot more noise than signal on the Internet about agentic engineering, what can be accomplished, and its implications for the future. The title I chose rather gives it away; it’s about choosing — carefully — all the things you need to choose when you’re solving the puzzles of software and systems development.

Software Engineering fundamentals matter more than ever.

Trick of the Month 🌗

• Become a Thought Leader in Seconds: LinkedIn CringeBot 3000

Thanks for reading!

Share this with your friends and get people to subscribe to this newsletter... otherwise this will be my last one 😭 ❤️

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.