We’ve gone from generating funny images to AI being a core part of being a developer quite fast, haven’t we?
2026 is going to be the year where someone using AI will become the norm, not the exception. It’s become my expectation that someone will use AI, and it’s shaping what I expect in terms of timing & quality of work.
AI is leverage#
When I wrote last week that I see the difference between the good & the bad code that LLMs can output , it’s because of past experience and skills I’ve mastered over the years.
Without those experiences or lessons learned, I wouldn’t be able to distinguish the signal from the noise. I wouldn’t know when I could trust the output of an LLM and when I should question it. When to dig deeper & when to accept the results.
It highlights an important aspect: if you use AI to add leverage to your work - to gain exponential improvements in speed, quality or thoroughness - you need something to leverage in the first place. You need your core skills, your ideas, your creativity. Without it, you’ll be amplifying random thoughts and get exactly that as output: random quality.
The quality of the output is determined by the quality of the input, and that’s not just constructing a clean prompt - it’s what goes into the prompt. Aka you. Your past. Your knowledge. Your directions.
LLMs show the savings#
Have you ever made a plan where your favourite LLM then ended with something along the lines of …
This is a very comprehensive task. This will take a few hours.
And it all got finished in like fifteen minutes? That’s the LLM being trained on human data and human expectations and not translating to the brave new world we’re in now, where those assumptions can be easily challenged.
Small teams can tackle larger challenges than ever before.
Your competition is using AI#
The difference between teams embracing agentic coding or LLMs vs. those that don’t is like night & day. Those that actively integrate it in their day-to-day are moving at a much faster pace.
Those that don’t will quickly be labeled as slow or expensive compared to those that do. I call developers embracing AI fast, but really it’s the other way around: they’re now operating at normal speed. The new normal. The bar was just raised.
Everyone will have to keep up or be slowly pushed out of business by those that have adopted it.
Developers first, the rest follows#
I don’t need to convince other developers that LLMs can help in their work. Most of that is proven one way or another.
But this is quickly coming to every industry. From legal to accounting to marketing to supply chain. In the 80s, people were concerned the computers that were introduced into the workplace would replace human jobs. They did. And then they created a whole new slew of jobs operating those computers. We’re in the next phase now.
There are still unanswered questions around privacy, security, attribution, accountability, monetisation and all the other fun stuff we need to take into account as a business.
Regardless of your profession, there’s new technology that can either greatly improve your productivity or might end up replacing you. Choose a side.