This week on The Download, Christina Warren covers Cloudflare’s acquisition of the Astro Technology Company and the winners of Game Off 2025. We also dive into the new GitHub Copilot SDK, updates to the Copilot CLI, and how you can now use your Copilot subscription directly with OpenCode. Plus, check out the spotlight on a new project called Handy.
#TheDownload #DevNews #GitHub
— CHAPTERS —
00:00 Welcome to The Download 00:35 Game Off 2025 winners shoutout 01:59 Use GitHub Copilot subscription with OpenCode 02:48 GitHub Copilot CLI updates, including Copilot SDK 04:30 Cloudflare has acquired Astro Technology Company 05:45 GitHub project spotlight: Handy 06:49 Christina's pick of the week: Harry Styles' new single Aperture 07:35 Outro
About GitHub It’s where over 180 million developers create, share, and ship the best code possible. It’s a place for anyone, from anywhere, to build anything—it’s where the world builds software. https://github.com
We’re in the middle of a transition period for the software industry.
Not just a new toolchain or another framework, but a shift in how we think about software: how it’s written, which paradigms we rely on, and who the real “actors” in the system are.
We’ve lived through major paradigm shifts before:
Monoliths to microservices
Imperative to declarative programming
On-premise infrastructure to cloud-native systems
Server-centric systems to mobile-first applications
Centralized backends to IoT and edge-driven architectures
Manual operations to infrastructure as code
Each shift forced us to rewrite our mental models.
AI is no longer just assisting developers, it is actively producing, shaping, and evolving software through agentic workflows, spec-driven development, and reusable agent skills.
That reality forces us to rethink something fundamental:
What should a library look like when humans are no longer the only, or even the primary, consumer?
Libraries Were Built for Developers — Not for Agents
For years, libraries and packages were designed almost exclusively for developer experience.
We optimized for:
Friendly APIs
Fluent abstractions
IntelliSense and discoverability
Boilerplate reduction
Familiar industry conventions
We spent enormous effort answering questions like:
Should this be opinionated or flexible?
What feels natural to developers?
How do we reduce mistakes through API design?
And we were right to do so.
But something has changed.
Developers are no longer the only ones writing code.
From Prompting to Agentic Development
AI-assisted development evolved quickly:
From simple prompting
To inline suggestions
To slash commands
To autonomous agents
To spec-driven development powered by agent skills
In these workflows, agents:
Generate significant portions of code
Make architectural decisions
Adapt code to local standards
Apply patterns repeatedly and consistently
At that point, agents become consumers of libraries.
And like in any other industry, when your customer changes, your product must evolve.
This is where Skills-Native Libraries enter the picture.
Skills-Native Libraries: The Missing Link
A Skills-Native Library is not just a package.
It is a combination of:
A core library that provides real, durable value
One or more agentic skills designed to use that library correctly
In practice, this means:
The library encodes the hard, non-trivial logic
The agent skill encodes best practices, patterns, and usage knowledge
Together, they form a coherent unit that works naturally in agentic workflows
Skills-Native Libraries can exist in any ecosystem (e.g., npm, pip, NuGet).
What makes them “skills-native” is not the runtime — it’s the intentional pairing of library and agent skill.
Generative Agents Don’t Need Determinism, They Need Boundaries
Modern AI code agents are not deterministic systems.
They are probabilistic, generative models that excel at:
Adapting to context
Personalization
Filling in gaps
Working with incomplete specifications
But when the decision space is too wide, they can:
Hallucinate behavior
Infer incorrect assumptions
Misuse APIs that look right
Violate hidden invariants
The goal is not to constrain agents into rigid contracts.
The goal is to shape the problem space.
Skills-Native Libraries do exactly that:
The library provides strong invariants and guardrails
The agent skill guides usage within those boundaries
Flexibility is preserved — but channeled
This is why agent skills and skills-native libraries are better together.
When Skills Replace Libraries and When They Don’t
In some simple cases, an agent skill might fully replace a library.
That’s fine.
But for non-trivial domains — event sourcing, consistency, concurrency, durability, data correctness, core logic belongs in a library.
The right model is:
Libraries for durable, high-value, invariant-heavy logic
Agent skills for usability, adaptation, and evolution
A well-designed Skills-Native Library might include:
A strong core package
A SKILL.md definition (governs tools, MCP, etc).
The Real Shift
The key shift is not: “AI replaces libraries”
The shift is:
Libraries and agentic skills are complementary primitives.
Together, they enable:
Safer agentic development
Faster iteration
Better alignment with domain intent
Less accidental complexity
Final Thought
Agentic development is not just about generating more code.
It’s about embedding knowledge into systems, some of it in libraries, some of it in skills.
Skills-Native Libraries are the foundation for better agentic results and faster dev cycles.
This week, we’re sharing powerful stories and hands-on code! The Angular community is defined by its willingness to share personal journeys, provide practical examples, and dive deep into major features like Signal Forms.
Check out these valuable resources from Angular experts:
From ASP.NET to Angular: My MVP Story Sonu Kapoor@SonuKapoor1978 shares a compelling personal story about transitioning from the ASP.NET ecosystem to becoming an Angular expert and MVP. This is a great read for anyone navigating a career shift!
Building AI-Powered Content with Angular and Gemini Ready to integrate AI into your apps? Babatunde Lamidi shares a complete code sample showing you exactly how to build an AI-powered content generator using Angular and the Gemini API. Explore the GitHub repo: https://github.com/babatundelmd/ng-content-generator
Modernizing Angular Control Flow Antonio Cardenas @yeoudev provides essential real-world guidance and code examples for updating your applications to use Angular’s new, more efficient built-in Control Flow syntax. See the code sample: https://dev.to/turingsoracle/updating-to-angular-20-a-real-world-guide-2h9o
Have you integrated Signal Forms or the new Control Flow into your app yet? Share your experience or a snippet of your code!
Help grow the ecosystem! Use #AngularSparkles to share your favorite Angular resources.