Half of 2026, in one page
Six months of regulation, agent tooling that mostly did not fix the bottleneck, and a web platform that quietly finished.
The first half, compressed.
the three things that actually happened#
Regulation became an engineering concern. The EU AI Act's high-risk obligations arrive in August; the Cyber Resilience Act's reporting obligations in September; post-quantum migration guidance firmed up across national agencies. For the first time in a while, compliance is showing up on engineering roadmaps rather than only in legal reviews.
Power stayed the binding constraint on compute. Interconnection queues, transformer lead times, and utility rate cases determine how fast capacity arrives. Every roadmap presented this year is downstream of a construction schedule.
The verification bottleneck did not move. Generation capability kept improving. Review capacity did not. The tooling investment continued to go into producing more code rather than into checking it, which is the wrong end of the problem and which I predicted would correct by now. It has not.
the thing I keep coming back to#
Generation got roughly two orders of magnitude cheaper. Verification got no cheaper at all.
Everything else — the review queue, the junior hiring contraction, the sudden importance of tests and type systems, the unease people cannot name about agent-written code — is a consequence of that asymmetry, and six months of watching it has not changed my read.
The skill that matters is the ability to look at plausible output and tell whether it is right. That skill is built by doing the work, and the work is being automated.
Nobody has solved this. Most of the discussion still treats it as either a non-problem or an apocalypse, and it is neither. It is an engineering and training problem with no established answer yet.
pieces I would re-read#
- "Verification is the whole job now" (8 Jan) — the argument, stated once, properly.
- "Prompt injection is SQL injection without the fix" (9 Feb) — why the analogy everyone makes stops before the part that matters.
- "Schema design is the only design that lasts" (6 Mar) — the thing you will still be living with in 2036.
- "Agent fleets in production" (27 Mar) — the honest numbers, which are much lower than the demos.
- "Idempotency is the only distributed systems concept you need" (26 May) — if you internalize one thing.
the grades so far#
In January I made five predictions. Three months in I graded one as wrong. At the halfway point:
Review tooling as a major funded category — still not happening at the scale I predicted. Funding continues to flow to generation. I was wrong about the market, and possibly wrong about the timing rather than the direction.
Repository-level agent configuration as standard practice — correct, and it happened faster than I expected. This is now table stakes for a well-maintained repository.
Power as a developer-visible line item — correct and accelerating. Regional compute price differentials are now large enough to affect architecture.
Supply chain controls with real teeth — in progress. The registry-level changes are landing and the migration is as painful as expected.
"Senior engineer" redefining around judgment — correct, uncomfortable, and nobody has a good answer for how the next generation acquires it.
what I am watching for the second half#
- The August AI Act deadline: holds, slips, or gets phased.
- Whether anyone ships a genuinely better code review interface.
- Whether the small-model tier keeps compressing the frontier's addressable workload.
- Whether junior hiring recovers, and what happens to the pipeline if it does not.
Back on Monday.
— Dom, June 26, 2026