The skills you need for 2026 — starting with Agentic Engineering. Agent-first stack across UI, data, and ops.
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Designing autonomous agents end-to-end: planning, tool use, memory, evals.
Building custom agents on Anthropic's managed infra.
Anthropic's pre-built agent harness on managed infrastructure.
Model Context Protocol — wiring agents to tools and external services.
Spawning isolated loops that return summaries to a master agent.
Reusable invocable workflows that compose into super-agents.
Deterministic scripts that run outside the loop on tool events.
Packaging skills, agents, hooks for distribution.
The terminal agent — slash skills, sub-agents, MCP, hooks.
Cursor, Windsurf, Zed — LLMs embedded at every layer of the editor.
5-min TTL on Anthropic — cache hits cut latency 2× and cost 10×.
1M tokens with Claude 4.7 — and how to actually use it.
Short-term, long-term, semantic — persistent recall across sessions.
Function calling with schemas — the agent's actuator.
JSON-schema-constrained responses — reliable parsing from unreliable models.
ReAct, plan-and-execute, reflection — the design vocabulary.
Orchestrators, specialists, trust boundaries — beyond one loop.
Reusable invocable workflows — the building blocks of super-agents.
Vercel, Modal, Replicate, Anthropic Managed Agents — where agents run.
Measuring agent skill performance with variance analysis.
Retrieval pipelines, embeddings, hybrid search.
Persistent agent memory, context windows, cognee-style stores.
Chain-of-thought, few-shot, structured outputs, context design.
pgvector, Pinecone, Weaviate — production-scale semantic search.
Traces, costs, latency, quality metrics — Langfuse, Braintrust.
LoRA, SFT, GRPO — adapting models without full retraining.
Prompt injection, jailbreaks, output validation — the new attack surface.
Image generation via Gemini CLI — featured images, diagrams, illustrations.
Programmatic video, agent-driven cuts, MP4 pipelines.
Nano Banana, Flux, Imagen — agents shipping pictures.
Sora, Veo, Kling + Remotion — the agent-driven video pipeline.
TTS / STT / realtime — sub-300ms is the bar.
App Router conventions: async params, edge vs node, server actions.
CSS-first config, theme tokens, container queries.
ABC design system tokens + primitives.
Postgres + RLS as the single source of truth across the stack.
Edge, ISR, preview branches, build telemetry.
Visual regression + agent-driven E2E.