Agent Skills are landing for Angular. This episode also covers the January Angular Q&A (Jeremy Elbourn leaving, markForCheck discussion, Dart's legacy) and Mark Thompson's RFC to make OnPush the default.
Skills landing in Analog first, and now in Angular
The AI world continues to evolve, and things that were top notch yesterday are already outdated today. When it comes to teaching AI how to write proper and modern Angular code, the answer in 2025 was the Angular CLI's built-in MCP server. In 2026, the answer is Skills.
With MCP, we have the issue that they overload the context size of the LLM, because the tools' manifest has to be loaded always. Skills, on the other hand, are lightweight. They are not loaded automatically - only a small amount of metadata. The whole content is only loaded once on demand, namely when the LLM decides that it is now time to use it.
Skills, like MCP, were introduced by Anthropic, which stands behind Claude Code. They first introduced them in October last year and in December standardized them as Agent Skills. To use them, you usually need one of the common IDEs that are good at AI integration, and you are not limited to Claude's models; it also works with others like GPT or Gemini.
Brandon Roberts posted that he added skills to Analog.js, which is a meta-framework for Angular. One week later, Angular reacted as well: Mark Thompson confirmed and created a PR so that Skills land officially in Angular.
Overview - Agent Skills
A simple, open format for giving agents new capabilities and expertise.
agentskills.io
Angular Q&A with the Angular team
We had the January Angular Q&A with the Angular team. As usual, Mark Thompson and Jeremy Elbourn were there, but this time they were joined by Doug Parker, the lead of the Angular CLI team. Unfortunately, it was also the last appearance of Jeremy Elbourn. He announced that he is leaving Google already in February. Jeremy Elbourn is the current Angular uber lead, which means he presides over the Angular projects - Material, framework, and the CLI. A successor has not been announced yet.
A very interesting side note: Jeremy was discussing the behavior of markForCheck on event listeners. So at the moment, a handled DOM event triggers change detection, and there was an internal discussion about changing that. The outcome was not to do it now, but to integrate that change once the "legendary" Signal Components come out. Signal Components were announced as a requirement for zoneless and were planned to land in Angular 17. But in the end, zoneless could be done without those kinds of changes, and Signal Components lost in terms of priority.
Using Dart in Angular had some negative consequences. It was there in the beginning but did not have the best impact on Angular's API. For example, Dart does not have types for DOM elements, and that's why nativeElement is any. Dart also does not have undefined, and that's why null shows up often in the older API.
ChangeDetection OnPush should become the default for Angular
Mark Thompson has published an RFC to set Angular's default change detection strategy to OnPush. The current one is called Default - probably not the best name.
OnPush means that when Angular synchronizes the state of our application with the DOM, a component under OnPush has to be marked as dirty in order to be checked for actual change. That dirty marking only happens if you have a handled user event, run markForCheck manually, use the async pipe, or - of course - if a Signal changes. A component that is not dirty also excludes its children from the change detection process.
Since Default is not the best name, it will get an alias called Eager, and that is already going to happen in Angular 21.2, which will be released later this month. The actual switch to OnPush as the default will happen in Angular 22.
As always, existing codebases will not be modified - safety first. As it was when standalone became the default, existing apps will get the explicit setting to ChangeDetectionStrategy.Eager (aka Default) via automatic migration.
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