Six Predictions for AI Coding in 2026
The 5th one will really make you think
It’s that time of the year, the time for frivolous listicles. Who has the leisure to write up anything substantive right now.
The current leading coding models (Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, Google’s Gemini) will continue to improve modestly at regular intervals, more or less in lockstep. Each new model release will come with claims that some new frontier has been breached and a benchmark bested, but it will continue to be hard to contextualise these claims since the benchmarks will continue to be a poor reflection of the daily hands-on work of a software engineer.
A new frontier model, maybe a Chinese one, will emerge and will top most coding benchmarks, seemingly out of nowhere. This will not be due to ever more scaling but due to some conceptual breakthrough. In the words of Ilya Sutskever: “Now the scale is so big. Is the belief really, ‘Oh, it’s so big, but if you had 100x more, everything would be so different?’ It would be different, for sure. But is the belief that if you just 100x the scale, everything would be transformed? I don’t think that’s true. So it’s back to the age of research again, just with big computers.” The immense resources available to Anthropic, OpenAI, Google et al mean that they can immediately exploit the same breakthrough and that they will close the upstart’s lead within months; models will not (yet) develop real moats this year.
Adoption of subscription-based dedicated AI editors like Cursor will stall or even decline because people will increasingly pay for the use of their favorite coding models directly from their existing IDE. (Read my post with a longer version of this argument.)
Leading AI skeptic Gary Marcus will post a recap of 2 tweets and 3 separate conversations with patrons of his local coffee shop, all of whom agreed with him that the coffee order he had generated with ChatGPT and read out to the barista from his phone (“a flat brown, meaning a flat white strained through cinnamon and dusted with Dubai chocolate“) looks unpalatable, which definitively proves that LLMs are a dead end, something he had of course been predicting since the day ChatGPT ruined his lunch with Yann LeCun who rather icily received its critique of the HTML on his personal website, read out aloud by Marcus over a dessert of lemon-glazed madeleines.
AI-enabled standing desks. I will not elaborate further.
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—whatever the hell that is—will not be achieved within the year. Ilya again: “The thing which I think is the most fundamental is that these models somehow just generalize dramatically worse than people. It’s super obvious.”
You wouldn’t know it from this post but the point of this newsletter is rather the opposite of idle speculation. It’s to show my work, to build real apps or prototypes with bleeding-edge AI tools and to reflect on the process. I’ll return to a fortnightly schedule of more serious issues in mid-January. Subscribe above to get the next one in your inbox.
Meanwhile, I’m wishing you as the Swiss wish each other this time of the year: en guete Rutsch! Literally “have a great slide”, which implies that this obstacle course of 2025 ends in a fun-colored playground slide that effortlessly transports us into the new year if we just put on our most frictionless pants, take a seat and let go.
—Nik