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The list that pops up when you hit / in Claude Code is intimidating at first. A hundred-odd commands, half of them named in a way that gives nothing away, and your own custom commands mixed in with the built-ins. You don’t need all of them. Ten commands cover almost everything you do day to day, and the rest is reference material you look up when the moment arrives. This page gives you both: the ten first, then the full list grouped by what it’s for 🧰 ...

Summary: Qwen3.8-Max in 30 Seconds Qwen3.8-Max is Alibaba’s new flagship model, made generally available on August 2, 2026. 2.4 trillion parameters, 95 billion active (MoE architecture). It reads text, images and video, and returns text. Context window is in the 1 million token class. On one task it ran 125 hours (about 5 days) with no human input, rebuilding an experiment from a machine learning paper from scratch, confirming its six findings, then inventing a method that beats the paper. It beats Claude Opus 4.8 on most coding and agent tests, trades blows with Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, and falls behind on some. API pricing is $2 input / $6 output per million tokens. Repeated input costs $0.25. This is the first time Alibaba will open-weight a Max-class model. “Next week” is the word, but there is no date, license or model card yet. Ask an AI to “rebuild the experiment in this paper, then improve on it” and it normally stalls after a few turns, waiting for you to step in and steer. ...

You want to tell an AI “read this file”, “pull that record from my database”, “close this issue”. The model cannot do any of it on its own, because it has no access to your machine, your database or your accounts. MCP exists to close exactly that gap. It puts a standard connection layer between the AI application and the outside world 🔌 What Is MCP? MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open-source standard for connecting AI applications to external systems. ...

“Agentic AI” is the most-discussed term of 2026, and most of what gets written about it looks at the same angle: enterprise transformation, productivity gains, automated customer service. All true, and none of it answers the question a developer actually has: how does this thing work? This post takes that angle. How the loop turns, which component actually executes tool code, why memory became its own architectural layer in 2026, and where these systems break 🤖 ...

If you have been using Claude Code for a while you have definitely run into three terms: skill, subagent and hook. All three live under “customizing Claude Code” and at first glance they look like they do the same job. They don’t. Each solves a different problem, and picking the wrong one means either needless complexity or a setup that never fires 🛠️ The Short Answer The decision rule Skill: when you keep writing the same instructions over and over Subagent: when a job produces so much output it floods your main conversation Hook: when you need a rule to hold without exception Slash Commands Are Skills Now The biggest change first, because most older guides miss it: custom slash commands have been merged into skills. ...