AI Agents Are Cooking and I'm Here for It
Happy Monday and welcome to another edition of the newsletter. Congratulations to the Seattle Seahawks for winning the Super Bowl. As a Cleveland Browns fan, I hope to see one of those in my lifetime.
I spent some time last week working on my new project ContentOS (working name), which is an application to track all of the content I am working on. I think one of the really amazing sides to all of these tools that we have been given is the ability to build out projects that I would not have had the bandwidth for in the past. The fun part about this is that it doesn't need to be super polished or work for every single use case because I am just building it for me.
What a week for AI coding tools. I spent most of my time this week exploring the latest releases from OpenAI and Anthropic, and I have thoughts. Lots of thoughts. I also got to catch up with my buddy Ralph and watch him do what he does best: build fun things with Java. Let's get into it.
This Week's Videos
You won't notice it in all the videos I worked on last week, but I had a bit of an aha moment when it comes to recording and editing videos for my YouTube channel. I had a good conversation about camera setups and color grading, and I think I have dialed in a really good process. Let me know if you can spot which one of these is not like the others 😉
Codex First Look
OpenAI finally gave us access to Codex, and I had to take it for a spin. In this video, I walk through my initial impressions of what it can do, how it compares to other AI coding assistants, and where I think it fits into a developer's workflow.
I ran it through several Spring Boot scenarios to see how it handles real-world Java development. Some things impressed me, some things didn't. If you're trying to decide whether to add another AI tool to your toolkit, this should help you figure out if Codex is worth your time.
Ralph Loop Vending Machine
Ralph is back! If you haven't seen Ralph's content before, you're in for a treat. In this episode, he builds a vending machine in Java and walks through his thought process every step of the way.
What I love about Ralph's approach is how he makes Java fundamentals feel approachable. This isn't about fancy frameworks or complex architectures. It's just solid Java programming, explained clearly. Perfect for developers who want to sharpen their core skills or newer devs looking to learn from someone who genuinely enjoys teaching.
Claude Code Tasks: Stop Babysitting Your AI Agent
I've been using Claude Code's task feature heavily, and it's changed how I approach certain types of work. In this video, I show you how to set up tasks, when to use them, and most importantly, when to step back and let the agent do its thing.
The key insight here is knowing when to give detailed instructions versus when to provide a goal and let Claude figure out the path. I share some patterns that have worked well for me and a few that definitely didn't.
Spring Office Hours
Last week on Spring Office Hours, DaShaun and I had Christian Tzolov on to talk about agentic patterns in Spring AI. This was a great conversation about how to build AI applications that can reason, plan, and execute multi-step tasks. If you're thinking about adding AI capabilities to your Spring applications, this episode covers the patterns you need to know.
Coming up this week, we've got two fantastic episodes. On February 9th, James Ward joins us to discuss Spring and AWS, covering everything from deployment strategies to cloud-native patterns. Then on February 11th, we have the one and only Jürgen Hoeller to talk about... well, Spring. When the project lead of the Spring Framework shows up, you tune in.
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
I've got some travel coming up! Here's where you can catch me in person:
ConFoo 2026 | February 25-27 | Montreal, Canada
- What's New in Spring Boot 4: Your comprehensive guide to the next major release. We'll cover HTTP interfaces, JSpecify null safety, Jackson 3 integration, and built-in resilience patterns through live coding demos.
- Introduction to Spring AI: Learn to build chatbots, implement RAG for enhanced context, and use MCP for AI orchestration. We'll write model-agnostic code that works with cloud and local LLMs.
DevNexus 2026 | March 4-6 | Atlanta, GA
- Fundamentals of Software Engineering in the Age of AI (Workshop): A hands-on workshop on March 4th about navigating development in an AI-augmented landscape. The rumors of our demise are greatly exaggerated!
- Fundamentals of Software Engineering in the Age of AI: The conference talk version covering how to use AI tools effectively while mastering the software craft.
- Integrating LLMs in Java: A Practical Guide to Model Context Protocol: Live coding demos showing how to connect Java applications to Claude Desktop and other AI tools while maintaining control over your data.
If you're attending either of these, come say hi!
In the News
Claude Opus 4.6
Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6 this week with improvements across the board.
Dan's Thoughts: Better? I guess we'll see. I've been running it through my usual tests, and the results are... mixed. Some things feel sharper, others feel about the same. I'll report back once I've had more time with it.
Claude Code Agent Teams
Anthropic also announced Agent Teams for Claude Code, allowing multiple agents to collaborate on tasks.
Dan's Thoughts: This is a really interesting feature. The idea of having specialized agents that can hand off work to each other opens up some compelling workflows. I'm already thinking about how this could work for larger refactoring projects where you want one agent focused on tests and another on implementation.
GPT 5.3 Codex
OpenAI dropped GPT 5.3 with Codex integration.
Dan's Thoughts: The combination of this and Codex has me using it more than I expected. Codex has some amazing new features like threads, and when you pair this with the new model and improved speed of OpenAI's models, this is a big win!
Tweets
I finally got around to upgrading to macOS Tahoe, and I really like it so far!
The one-year anniversary of the term "Vibe Coding."
UNTIL NEXT WEEK
I hope you enjoyed this newsletter installment, and I will talk to you in the next one. If you have any questions for me or topics you would like me to cover please feel free to reply to this email or reach out to me on Twitter.
Happy Coding,
Dan Vega
https://www.danvega.dev