Squid Club Jan 2026 Newsletter

2,099 messages. 48 repos shared. Three debates every AI agent builder needs to know about.

Published: 2026-02-11 | Author: Sahar Carmel | Category: Community Tags: community, agents, skills, orchestration | Reading Time: 10 min read

At 1 AM last week, I was scrolling up through the community WhatsApp trying to find a specific message. It took me 20 minutes because there were 2,099 messages in January alone.

I stopped and just looked at what had been happening.

232 people. 31 consecutive days. 48 GitHub repos shared by 33 different members. And nobody asked anyone to do any of it. People building things, getting stuck, solving problems, and sharing what they learned -- because that's how you build something together.

Our monthly newsletter distills everything the community discovered. This is January's summary -- three major debates, tools that community members built from scratch, and things you can try this week.

On January 6th, a community member wrote: "I use the Superpowers skill workflow for everything -- brainstorming, worktrees, implementation plans, subagent-driven dev. What do you all use?"

What followed was the longest technical debate we've ever had: 96 messages in a single thread, with ripple discussions continuing for weeks.

Approach 1: Superpowers -- "Less over-engineering"

A structured workflow: brainstorming leads to worktrees, then to implementation plans, then two work modes (subagent-driven being the preferred one). The key advantage? It works directly with Claude Code's native capabilities rather than adding a separate orchestration layer.

"I don't move without it."

Approach 2: cc10x -- "The orchestrator knows what to activate"

The fundamental difference: all skills and agents are activated by a dedicated orchestrator, not by Claude Code itself. The orchestrator decides which agents and skills to deploy and manages memory across sessions. Think of it as adding a project manager between you and your agents.

Approach 3: get-shit-done -- "It's insane"

Mentioned 4 separate times across January by different members. One member called it "insane" after adopting it. The appeal: an opinionated, single-purpose workflow that doesn't try to be everything.

Approach 4: Custom skills -- "Build your own"

Several experienced practitioners argued that the best orchestration is the one you build yourself. A community member shared Skill Mill -- a factory approach to generating skills on demand rather than collecting pre-built ones.

"This is where skills truly shine. Not just boosting Claude Code, but giving it capabilities it fundamentally doesn't have without them."

No consensus winner -- and that's the point. The community converged on a principle rather than a tool: pick one system and commit to it. The practitioners who struggled were the ones constantly switching between orchestration approaches.

One senior member put it simply: "Before I used a structured system, I had separate skills for spec-writing and design. Since adopting one, I stopped needing them."

On January 29th, someone opened what they called a "Pandora's box": "I have a serious concern that the model is significantly smarter when consumed via API key versus through the Max subscription."

The claim: projects built with Claude Code on API felt sharper -- better plans, fewer iterations needed. Same model, different quality.

The original poster described building two projects: one on Max that needed 30 minutes of correction, and one on API that delivered exactly what was intended in a single shot.

Another member corroborated from a different angle:

"I noticed that Cursor with Claude models works much better than Claude directly. Maybe it's Cursor's wrapper, or maybe it's the API key usage as you describe."

And a third:

"Someone told me they observed that more tokens are used per action with the API, as if they're limiting it on Max."

A community researcher dug into Anthropic's documentation and came back with sourced findings:

1. System prompts differ -- The web UI, Claude Code, and API each have different system-level instructions that shape behavior
2. Token budgets may vary -- Subscription tiers may apply different token limits per interaction
3. Same base model -- Despite behavioral differences, it's the same underlying model
4. Cost matters -- One member burned through $100 in API credits in 2.5 days, while another on the $200/month plan rarely hit limits

Not everyone agreed. A practitioner on the $200 plan pushed back: "I don't feel that's the case for me, especially for code writing." And another noted that two different projects aren't a fair comparison -- too many variables.

The community couldn't definitively prove the API produces better output. But the hypothesis isn't baseless: different system prompts, different token budgets, and different context configurations can absolutely affect output quality. The difference isn't in the model -- it's in the configuration wrapping it.

A different kind of question surfaced on January 27th -- not about tools, but about ambition:

"Has anyone used Claude Code as an Architect/DevOps for a truly complex system? I'm not talking about integration. I'm talking about building a Salesforce/Zoho-scale platform from scratch."

A member who's done it multiple times shared the reality:

"There are tons of challenges, especially in the later stages of building. You get to something initial very fast, but taking it to production is a real headache."

Another practitioner, three weeks into building a complex system with Claude Code, offered a more optimistic view:

"It feels like working with a developer five times better than me. Compared to Cursor, which felt like a developer at my level, Claude Code's work quality is significantly higher."

Their workflow:

1. Init -- Let Claude index and understand the big picture
2. Permissions -- Grant full access after initial trust-building
3. Commands as instructions -- Write detailed instructions in markdown files, run them as commands

Getting started is easy. Getting to production is hard. The gap isn't the AI -- it's that complex systems accumulate state, edge cases, and integration points that require human architectural judgment. AI gets you 70% faster to a working prototype. The last 30% still needs you.

A community member applied Netflix's Chaos Engineering philosophy to AI agents. Balagan Agent doesn't test if your agent works -- it tests how your agent behaves when things break. Tool failures, malformed responses, context overflow.

"I'm not testing whether agents work. I'm testing whether they break gracefully."

With 57% of organizations now running agents in production and quality cited as the top barrier, this is exactly the kind of tooling the ecosystem needs.

The Happy app lets you control Claude Code from mobile. A community member discovered a permissions bug and published a patch that enables full permissions mode -- critical for fire-and-forget mobile workflows.

Two people who never met, working together on something that doesn't exist anywhere else.

One creative member embedded a Claude Agent chat interface directly into their application's UI. Instead of switching to the terminal, they interact with Claude Code from within the app they're building. Shared as documentation in their project repo.

Multiple members discovered that combining Remotion (React-to-video framework) with Claude Code skills produces surprisingly good promotional videos. The workflow: `npx skills add remotion-dev/skills`, write React components, compile to video.

1. Use "btw" for side questions -- Start your message with "btw" to ask Claude a quick question without derailing the current task
2. Switch to Warp Terminal -- Text flickering in Claude Code disappears. Multiple members confirmed.
3. Use Context7 for fresh docs -- Models are trained on docs from 6+ months ago. One practitioner discovered they could do a complete refactoring after Context7 revealed new API capabilities.
4. Install skill-creator -- Anthropic's official skill that builds other skills. The recommended starting point.
5. claude-piv-skeleton -- One command sets up the full Plan-Implement-Verify structure. Built after a community webinar.
6. Codex 5.2 in Cursor -- High reasoning mode delivers results at Sonnet's level. "Codex is really disciplined. Hard to get used to after Claude's sometimes-undisciplined models."
7. Balagan Agent -- Chaos-test your agents before production
8. claude_code_screen_capture -- Windows screenshot tool: captures screen, saves immediately, copies path to clipboard
9. Prompt injection prevention layer -- Add a local model as a screening layer that checks inputs before they reach your main agent. 13 members debated approaches on January 27th.

• Claude That Learns: Building a Self-Evolving AI System -- How to implement learning mechanisms through structured reflection
• HDD: Human-Driven Development -- A methodology for building production agents
• Hiring in the AI Era -- Why recruitment methods always lag behind technology

• MCP Tool Search shipped in CC 2.1.7 -- 85% token reduction
• 270+ plugins with 739 agent skills now catalogued
• Codex 5.2 -- Free desktop app with doubled rate limits

Three teams in the community are running parallel experiments: one is testing Opus 4.6 team configurations (mixing model tiers for cost efficiency), another is building evaluation pipelines that catch regressions before deploy, and a third is pushing the limits of what you can build from a phone. First results in February.

This report synthesized 2,099 messages from 232 participants across all 31 days of January 2026.

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