MasterMindMandan - Field Report

Copilot CLI now has Plan Mode for AI collaboration before building. Native GitHub CLI integration means no more standalone extension. GPT-5 mini and GPT-4.1 included free (no premium requests). Auto-compaction at 95% token limit. New web_fetch tool for URL content retrieval.

Security fixes for 6 vulnerabilities including DoS attacks, memory exhaustion, and arbitrary code execution in dev environments. Affects go command, archive/zip, crypto/tls, net/url packages. Run go install golang.org/dl/go1.25.6@latest.

Anthropic overhauling Claude's guiding principles - moving from rule lists to teaching WHY. First acknowledgment that Claude might have "some kind of consciousness or moral status." Fundamental behavioral changes incoming.

/plugin command for marketplace management, /review command to analyze code changes, --enable-all-github-mcp-tools flag for read-write GitHub MCP. Edit tool now shows diffs in timeline.

UI for skill enable/disable, tui.experimental_mode setting, new /permissions flow in TUI. Matching Claude Code's skill ergonomics.

SST's open-source coding agent now one of most-starred repos. 75+ LLM providers including local Ollama. Tab-switchable agents (build/plan). Positioned as privacy-first Claude Code alternative.

MCP servers now loadable from JSON config (Claude-like format supported). xAI's Grok Code Fast 1 added as recommended agent model. Instant apply replaces streaming diffs for snappier editing.

Jan 9: Docker-based Dev Containers for reproducible environments. Jan 7: New worktree trust mechanism. Zeta model powers Edit Prediction. Agent Panel for agentic editing.

Green Tea garbage collector now default (was experimental). 10-40% GC overhead reduction. 30% faster small allocations (<512 bytes). New faster JPEG encoder/decoder. Expected February 2026.

5,000+ respondents. High satisfaction but frustrations around best practices, missing features, and finding trustworthy modules. Go dropped from TIOBE #7 to #16 (analysts say "too stable").

Rust Foundation allocating $650K USD for 2026 project funding. gccrs (GCC Rust compiler) making progress - important for architectures LLVM doesn't support. Linux 7.4 LTS may require Rust.

Rust veteran Steve Klabnik creating new "Rue" language. 70K lines of Rust in 2 weeks, built with Claude as copilot. Worth watching as meta-example of AI-assisted language development.

New flagship model targeting Lunar New Year (Feb 17). 1M+ token context, consumer hardware support (dual RTX 4090 or single RTX 5090). Claims to outperform Claude 3.5 Sonnet on coding (unverified).

New paper by founder Liang Wenfeng proposes "Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections" (mHC). Improves scaling without instability or cost. China invested $8.4B in AI startups early 2026.

No new January announcements, but reasoning version of Mistral Large 3 (675B total params) is coming. Devstral 2 (Dec 2025) hit 72.2% on SWE-bench. Mistral Vibe CLI released Dec 10.

Python core devs opened pre-PEP for introducing Rust into CPython. Motivations: memory safety, fearless refactoring, ergonomics. Could reshape Python's internals.

Five leaders emerged: Claude Code (deep reasoning), Codex CLI (minimal interface), OpenCode (privacy/flexibility), Copilot CLI (GitHub integration), Aider (Git-first). Choose by workflow, not capability.