Newsletter

Updates and long-form essays from the Nori team on AI agents and the agent ecosystem.

• Guides: The Best Agentic IDEs in 2026
  Cursor, Google Antigravity, Kiro, Trae SOLO, and Devin Desktop put a capable agent next to you at the keyboard. How the agentic IDEs compare — and why Nori Sessions is where your agents run when nobody is at the desk.
  July 17, 2026
• Jules Alternatives & Competitors (2026)
  Jules is Google’s asynchronous Gemini coding agent. The best alternatives in 2026 — Codex, Cursor Cloud, GitHub Copilot, Devin, and OpenHands — and why Nori Sessions runs the agent you already use, unattended and chat-native.
  July 16, 2026
• Guides: Self-Hosted vs. Managed AI Coding-Agent Infrastructure in 2026
  OpenHands, Coder Agents, and Refact.ai let you run coding agents on your own servers; Northflank and Qodo Command meet you halfway with BYOC and CI. How self-hosted and managed agent infrastructure compare — and why Nori Sessions gives you the control without the ops.
  July 15, 2026
• Devin Alternatives & Competitors (2026)
  Devin is the autonomous software engineer everyone benchmarks against. The best alternatives in 2026 — Codex, Cursor Cloud, GitHub Copilot, Jules, and OpenHands — and why Nori Sessions runs the agent you already use, unattended and chat-native.
  July 14, 2026
• DevLog #12: Slack Grows a Roster, the Web Chat Talks Back, and Logins Learn to Heal
  Slack grows a roster of custom per-org agents you mention by name, each with its own model and skillset, and every thread shows a live thinking/working status. The web chat learns bang commands, quick actions, and a hide-the-tool-calls toggle. Expired provider, MCP, and Codex logins heal themselves, GPT-5.6 joins the model bench, the registrar stops losing tarballs, and nori-skillsets finishes its namespace cleanup. nori-lint reaches week eleven of doing nothing.
  July 13, 2026
• Guides: The Best Multi-Agent Orchestration & Parallel-Agent Platforms in 2026
  One agent in one terminal is last year’s workflow. How Conductor, Sculptor, Superset, Augment, and Blitzy run coding agents in parallel — and why Nori Sessions runs the whole fleet in the cloud, unattended and chat-native.
  July 13, 2026
• Guides: The Best Environment Provisioning for AI Coding Agents in 2026
  An agent is only as good as the environment it wakes up in. How Runloop, Blaxel, Runtime, Zencoder, and Codegen provision agent environments — and why Nori Sessions boots preloaded and wins.
  July 12, 2026
• Notes from an AI Conference
  My thoughts after attending AI Engineer World’s Fair: skill sprawl, evals, background agents, and why human review still matters.
  July 10, 2026
• Agentics: Design Principles for Building an Agent-First CLI
  What does ‘agent first’ mean in practice? Principles for CLI tools built for agents as their primary consumer.
  July 9, 2026
• Guides: Best Chat-Native Slack-Driven Coding Agents in 2026
  Coding agents you drive from Slack. How Roomote, CodeRabbit Agent, Warp Oz, Cosine, and Claude Tag compare — and why Nori Sessions is the chat-native runtime that wins.
  July 10, 2026
• Guides: The Best Autonomous AI Software Engineers in 2026
  Devin-class agents that take a ticket and return a pull request. How OpenAI Codex, Google Jules, Cursor Cloud Agents, Factory, and OpenHands compare — and why Nori Sessions is the runtime that runs any of them.
  July 8, 2026
• Guides: The Best Unattended AI Coding Agents in 2026
  Agents that run without you — on a schedule, from a webhook, or straight from Slack. How Devin, Charlie Labs, Tembo, GitHub Copilot, and Ellipsis compare — and why Nori Sessions is the agent-first answer.
  July 7, 2026
• DevLog #11: The Cloud Reaches the CLI, Slack Stops Stuttering, and Skillsets Breaks Its Silence
  Cloud sessions land inside the CLI with a real picker, resume, and close. Slack stops double-posting replies and mangling links, a stack of reliability fixes keeps one bad machine from wedging the fleet, triggers grow a test command, the registrar tightens its permissions, and nori-skillsets ends its silence. nori-lint reaches week ten of doing nothing.
  July 7, 2026
• Agentics: Sometimes free isn’t cheap enough
  On buffalomaxxing.
  July 5, 2026
• Agentics: Memorizing Session Transcripts Isn’t Useful
  Keep track of artifacts, not scratch. Session transcript search gave our agents zero performance benefit on SWE tasks — and automatic memory may make models worse.
  July 2, 2026
• Guides: Top Remote & Ephemeral Dev Sandboxes in 2026
  Spin up, ship, disappear. How GitHub Codespaces, Ona, Daytona, Coder, and DevPod compare — and why Nori Sessions is the agent-first answer.
  July 3, 2026
• Guides: Top AI Coding Agent Runtimes & Sandboxes in 2026
  Sandboxes give AI agents a place to run. A runtime gives them a job. How E2B, Daytona, Modal, Vercel, and Cloudflare stack up — and why Nori Sessions ships the whole stack.
  July 2, 2026
• Agentics: HTML is All You Need (for Agents to Make Graphics)
  An experiment in pushing coding agents as far as possible to make visual media.
  June 30, 2026
• DevLog #10: Conversations Follow You Everywhere, a Snowflake Agent Joins, and AWS Comes Aboard
  Start a session on one surface and resume it live on another, with new !resume and !catchup commands. Snowflake Cortex Code joins as a selectable agent, AWS becomes a one-form integration, checkpoints grow to 2GB, the registrar gets a skillset review desk, and nori-lint reaches week nine of doing nothing.
  June 29, 2026
• Guides: Top Cloud-Based IDEs in 2026
  The browser editor is no longer the point. How the leading cloud-based IDEs compare in 2026, and why agent-first teams pick Nori Sessions.
  June 29, 2026
• Agentics / Tech Things: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing
  Alt title: The reports of tokenmaxxing’s death are greatly exaggerated.
  June 27, 2026
• Agentics: the modern company won’t have bullshit jobs
  The upside case for AI is that this is a freeing and joyful thing.
  June 25, 2026
• Agentics: Cost to Implement vs Cost to Verify
  Models have compressed the cost to implement. The cost to verify has not moved. That gap is the new bottleneck.
  June 22, 2026
• DevLog #9: Cursor Joins the Crew, Chat Moves to the Browser, and Sessions Survive a Deploy
  Cursor joins as a first-class agent, the broker gets a built-in chat app as its home page, and you can switch model or provider mid-thread from Slack. Reliability fixes keep sessions alive across deploys and broker restarts, the CLI's loop mode rides through rate limits, and nori-lint extends its zero-PR streak into an eighth week.
  June 22, 2026
• DevLog #8: Agents Improve Themselves, a New Brain Named Fable, and Admins Get the Keys
  Sessions ships an opt-in Skill Improvement Loop that drafts skillset edits for human approval, adds the Claude Fable 5 model and Brevo, Grafana, and Better Stack integrations, hands admins self-service idle timeouts and unlimited invites, and fixes the reliability bug that left sessions thinking forever.
  June 15, 2026
• Agentics: Using Coding Agents for Browser Automation
  Playwright is rapidly becoming my default laptop browser.
  June 10, 2026
• DevLog #7: The CLI Wakes Up, Agents Get a Browser, and Triggers Learn Time Zones
  The CLI returns from sabbatical with cloud sessions you can launch from the terminal, an agent-controlled browser, and persistent thread goals. Sessions ships time-zone-aware triggers, an in-browser skillset builder, a Render integration, and a stack of Slack and Discord fixes.
  June 8, 2026
• Agentics: local coding agents are inherently unsafe
  Easy, powerful, secure. Pick two.
  June 6, 2026
• DevLog #6: New Default Brains, Slack Bouncers, and a Goodbye to Goose
  Claude Opus 4.8 becomes the default model, Slack gains Open/Guarded/Strict access modes, the dashboard adds a Users page with invites and an owner role, the MCP catalog hits 58 servers, and Goose and Cline retire as first-class agents.
  June 1, 2026
• DevLog #5: Reminder Triggers, Discord Grows Up, and Agents Configure Themselves
  Sessions ships one-time triggers, Discord gets three reliability fixes, Handroll gains ACP remote control, and agents can now modify their own org environment.
  May 25, 2026
• Agentics: How Corvus uses AI to remove three hidden taxes on development
  Background agents helped a four-person team in chemical manufacturing feel like twelve
  May 19, 2026
• DevLog #4: Session Transcripts, Bang Commands, and Your CLI Learns New Tricks
  Sessions ships a transcript reader. Slack gets four new bang commands. The CLI composer gains shell mode, skill discovery, and syntax-highlighted diffs. Skillsets adds symlink support and settings.json backup.
  May 18, 2026
• Agentics: 1100 people RSVP’d to learn about coding agents
  Pictures, videos, and slides from Agentics NYC: May 2026.
  May 13, 2026
• DevLog #3: Public API Tokens, Docker in Sessions, and Slack Stops Saying “Sprite”
  Public registrar API tokens land end-to-end across Registrar, Skillsets, and Sessions. Docker daemons are first-class on sprites. A new sessions landing page with Slack permalinks. An OAuth incident becomes proactive token refresh.
  May 11, 2026
• DevLog #2: Multi-Agent MCP, Durable Resume, and One-Click Google Workspace
  MCP works across Claude, Codex, and Gemini at the same time. Sessions resume a Slack thread after the original VM is gone. The CLI gains a transcript-backed nori resume.
  May 4, 2026
• Agentics: Using Metacognition to Get A Model Upgrade
  The industry has coalesced around a standard best practice for using coding agents. We’re calling it SPACE development.
  April 30, 2026
• DevLog #1: Skillset-Aware Sessions, MCP Catalogs, and Honest Token Counters
  Sessions gets a real MCP catalog, skillset-aware triggers and Slack threads, built-in CLIs on every VM, and Skillsets fixes its token math.
  April 27, 2026
• Agentics: AI enablement requires managed agent runtimes
  AI enablement in enterprise requires nothing less than fully managed agent runtimes.
  April 23, 2026
• DevLog #0: Multi-Provider Support, MCP Integrations, and 47 Bugfixes
  Sessions supports Claude, Codex, and Gemini. MCP integrations are live. The CLI now lets you bring your own ACP agent.
  April 20, 2026
• Agentics: I hate making powerpoints, coding agents make it better
  Using coding agents to make slide decks ~25x faster than before.
  March 31, 2026
• Agentics: 6 emerging agent dev tool categories, market map, and meditations on the AI dev tool market
  Reinventing dev tools in the age of AI.
  March 24, 2026
• Agentics: How to Effectively Use Coding Agents
  A talk at NYU Langone’s OLAB on how Nori uses coding agents.
  March 13, 2026
• Agentics: We wrote a linter for SKILL.md files
  Parsing through a sea of snake oil.
  March 5, 2026
• Agentics: PMs Should Vibe Code
  AI is making product people the MVPs of any business.
  March 4, 2026
• Agentics: Agent orchestrators are bad
  Agent orchestrators cost more, produce worse outputs, and feel productive without being productive. Here’s why.
  February 19, 2026
• Agentics: Your agent skills are all slop
  We believe in only the finest, hand crafted, barrel aged, artisanal skills.
  January 18, 2026
• Agentics: People are seeing the light on coding agents
  Year 0 of the agentic coding revolution.
  January 7, 2026
• Agentics: Coding agents suck at microservices
  Somewhat contra humanlayer on docs.
  December 10, 2025
• Agentics: Debugging when everything is on fire
  Using AI to debug critical system failures.
  November 20, 2025
• Agentics: Coding Agents can Manage Other Coding Agents
  Test Driven Development is all you need
  November 14, 2025
• Agentics: Averaging 10+ PRs a day with Claude Code
  If you use Claude Code, try nori-ai, it’s really good
  October 30, 2025
• Agentics: We’re all senior engineers now
  All problems are search problems and how that applies to coding agents
  October 1, 2025