It feels good to be back from holiday. Feeling refreshed, mostly.

The to-do list is longer, the inbox is noisier, and home has thoughtfully provided its own backlog: a replacement car, a new school uniform, and a garden that has staged a minor coup.

I may need another holiday already.

And that’s before even talking about programming and the revolution it is currently going through. I’m a Python educator. Somewhat unusually for Python educators, I’ve been a full-time Python educator for over a decade.

But AI is changing how people learn and what people need to learn. Like many others, I find myself fascinated by what I can now do with AI, while also aware that it is changing the economics of work that has supported me for years.

It’s time to find out how anti-fragile I am. Over the coming weeks and months, I’ll write about using AI, I’ll share my thoughts about programming in 2026 and beyond, and I’ll tell you what I think about how learning and teaching are changing.

So I am going to explore this in public: how we learn, teach, write, and assess code in an AI-shaped world.

Here is some signposting for what else you will read on these pages in the coming months:

• SOLID Ideas • I have been wanting to write a series on SOLID programming principles for a while. They matter more than ever when we want AI agents to write robust code for us rather than plausible-looking but brittle code. The series will look not only at what the principles are, but why they matter and what can go wrong when we ignore them.

• Agents Unpacked • Before going on holiday, I started this new section on this publication. I am thinking about republishing the first two posts in a significantly updated form, then carrying on at pace. Perhaps it will become a book, too. Agents are here, and I want to understand what they are, how they differ from LLM chat interfaces, and how to use them efficiently. You can join me on that learning journey.

• Learning Rust in Public • I also want to learn Rust and will set up another section here to do that in public, as they say these days. I will use a similar format to Agents Unpacked, in which my personal learning agent and I have a discussion as I learn from it.

So there is plenty on the horizon here at The Python Coding Stack: plenty of Python, and plenty of Python-adjacent stuff, too. And some other stuff, too. I hope you will join me for the journey.