Sunday Rundown #124: Coding Agents & Tap Dance-Off
Sunday Bonus #84: A new "Sunday Bonus" directory.
Happy first Sunday of 2026, friends!
Welcome back to the weekly look at generative AI that covers the following:
Sunday Rundown (free): this week’s AI news + a fun AI fail.
Sunday Bonus (paid): an exclusive segment for my paid subscribers.
Let’s get to it.
🗞️ AI news
Here are this week’s AI developments.
👩💻 AI releases
New stuff you can try right now:
Alibaba news:
Qwen Code v0.6.0 introduced new commands, an experimental “skills” feature, and multi-provider support.
Qwen-Image-2512 is an image model that generates better faces, finer details, and cleaner text in images and slides. (Try on Qwen Chat.)
Qwen-Image-Edit-2511 can edit images with better identity consistency and has built-in support for LoRA styles. (Try on Qwen Chat.)
Qwen3‑TTS‑VC‑Flash and VoiceDesign‑VD‑Flash let you clone a voice from three seconds of audio or craft custom voices from text prompts.
Liquid AI released LFM2-2.6B-Exp, a small language model that beats much larger ones at following instructions and basic math. (Try here.)
MiniMax open-sourced M2.1, tuned for real-world coding and agent workflows with faster, more concise responses and stronger tool support. (Try here.)
OpenAI added new “Personalization” settings in ChatGPT so you can fine-tune traits like warmth, enthusiasm, and emoji use.
Tencent open-sourced HY-Motion 1.0, a model that turns text prompts into high-quality 3D animations for games and film. (Try on Hugging Face.)
Z.ai released GLM-4.7, boasting improved agentic coding and terminal tasks while generating cleaner web UIs and slides.
🔬 AI research
Cool stuff you might get to try one day:
YouTube is trialing Playables Builder, which lets creators make and publish simple playable games without coding. In closed beta (apply here).
📖 AI resources
Helpful AI tools and stuff that teaches you about AI:
“Top Frontier Models by Modality 2025” [REFERENCE]—a Twitter thread round-up from LM Arena.
🔀 AI random
Other notable AI stories of the week—acquisitions and partnerships galore:
Adobe partnered with Runway to integrate its generative video models into Adobe’s creative tools for faster AI-powered video creation.
Groq struck a deal with NVIDIA to license its inference tech to speed up and scale AI model serving worldwide.
Manus joined Meta to help build the next era of innovation in spatial computing and immersive tech.
🤦♂️ AI fail of the week
The guy who kept “air dancing” while down gets an A+ for effort
Send me your AI fail for a chance to be featured in an upcoming Sunday Rundown.
💰 Sunday Bonus #84: Find relevant Sunday Bonus entries faster with a new directory
New year, new Sunday Bonus page.
To date, I've published over 80 Sunday Bonus entries, including the 15 original “Sunday Showdowns” with AI tips.
But having this much bonus content has become a bit of an issue: It’s increasingly tricky to navigate the page and discover relevant older entries. The current “one long bullet list of titles” approach doesn’t quite cut it anymore.
So I vibe-coded a better directory with the help of my friends ChatGPT and Gemini.
It’s now much easier to sort, filter, and search the library of Sunday Bonuses to find what you’re after.
Test it out here: