The Batch

Issue 350 of The Batch, published 24 April 2026, opens with Andrew Ng ranking software work by how far coding agents accelerate it: maximum gain on frontend, moderate on backend, little on infrastructure, and mostly human still on research. The same issue covers Z.ai's GLM-5.1, Agility Robotics putting Digit humanoids on Schaeffler's production lines in South Carolina, and the revolt against data center construction.

The newsletter is published weekly by DeepLearning.AI, and its "Dear friends" section carries Ng's letters. That section is what keeps pulling attention back. In issue 359, dated 26 June 2026, Ng registers the spread of Loop Engineering, a term popularized by Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code, and Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, then lays out the three loops that structure how he builds: agentic coding at the scale of minutes, developer feedback at tens of minutes to hours, external feedback at days.

Issue 366, dated 14 August 2026, carries the AI Engineering Skills Map: four skills Ng presents as the most important for a developer, drawn from an analysis of more than 10,000 job postings, structured interviews with experts, hiring managers and recruiters, and surveys. Nothing quantified is published with it. There is no weighting, no sub-skills, a clustering Ng himself calls informal, and the detailed map pushed to future posts.

For durable citation, the newsletter is preferable to Ng's X post: the text is identical, dated, and archivable.