Five things that will actually change in 2026

Every January the prediction posts arrive and they are all about model capability, which is the least useful thing to predict because it is both the most forecast and the least actionable.

Here are five changes to how software actually gets made. I will grade these in December.

1. Review tooling becomes a real product category#

The bottleneck moved to verification in 2025 and the tooling did not follow. We are still reviewing machine-generated changes with an interface designed in 2008 for occasional human contributions.

What has to exist: review surfaces that show intent rather than only diff. Which invariants does this change preserve? What did the author consider and reject? Which tests exercise the changed path, and did any of them exist before this change?

Some of that can be generated. Most of it is a UI problem nobody has solved because the pain only became acute in the last eighteen months.

Watch for this to be one of the most-funded developer tooling categories of the year.

2. Repository-level agent configuration becomes standard practice#

AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, .cursorrules, and their cousins converged on the same idea in 2025: the repository tells the agent how to work in it. Build commands, test commands, conventions, things not to touch.

In 2026 this stops being an optional nicety and becomes part of the definition of a well-maintained repository, the way a README and a CI config are. New projects will have one from the start. Onboarding docs and agent instructions will merge, because they are the same document with a different reader.

The second-order effect is good: writing down how your project actually works helps humans too, and a lot of teams will document things properly for the first time because a machine needed it.

3. Power becomes a line item developers think about#

Not in an abstract climate sense. In a "which region, which instance type, what does this cost" sense.

Electricity prices in datacenter-dense regions rose through 2025 and the rate cases are ongoing. Cloud pricing follows. Regional price differentials for compute are going to become large enough that they affect architecture decisions, the way egress pricing already does.

Expect "run the batch job in the cheap region overnight" to go from a sustainability talking point to a cost-optimization default.

4. The supply chain gets a real control, not another dashboard#

Four significant npm incidents in 2025, ending with a self-propagating worm. The registry-level controls — mandatory trusted publishing, restrictions on long-lived tokens, install-script defaults — are coming, and they will break workflows.

That breakage is the point. The ecosystem has been asking maintainers to be individually unphishable for a decade, and it has not worked, because it cannot.

Expect a painful migration and a meaningfully safer ecosystem at the end of it.

5. "Senior engineer" quietly redefines around judgment#

The mechanical parts of the job — writing the code, remembering the API, finding the bug in a file you can see — got substantially cheaper. What did not get cheaper: knowing what to build, knowing when something is wrong, knowing which complexity is worth it, and being able to say no with a reason.

This has always been what seniority meant. It is now what it only means, and the gap between people who have it and people who were fast typists is going to become uncomfortable to talk about at promotion committees.

The related problem, which nobody has solved: the traditional path to developing that judgment was doing the mechanical work for several years. If juniors do not do that work, where does the judgment come from?

I do not know. It is the most important open question in the profession right now and almost all the discussion of it is either dismissive or catastrophizing.

what I am not predicting#

Anything about AGI. Anything about a specific model beating a specific benchmark. Anything about a company's valuation.

Those get all the attention and none of them change what you do on Tuesday.