What Every Developer is Thinking About Right Now. Of Course It's AI.

Anybody around computers knows that 2026 has been a transformative year. After decades in the world of fiction and a few recent years as a promising "proof of concept" it is finally becoming a useful everyday tool. It is easy at this point to dial up the excitement to eleven but, we do need to each stop and think about what this technology means personally and for the world as a whole.

Where Do I Land?#

As we get late into 2026 here are my thoughts on AI when it comes to the world of web development.

It is the new standard way to work#

The models are now good enough and consistent enough we have transitioned from a place where AI is a cool new tool to being the way we just do things. In almost every case it is now negligent to not use AI in the workflow of a website project. Coding by hand is now relegated to the hobbyist mode done just for fun and enrichment. If we are are honest, it has been going this direction anyway over the past decade with code completion and linters. We have also been adding layers of abstraction since the beginning of computers so this type of progress is nothing new.

Hype Vs Reality#

AI companies want to hype their product as if it is going to usher in a new era of human existence. Some even talk in religious terms. AI will disrupt many industries and there is great power in what it can do. It also has the potential to cause destruction if used poorly. With that said, nothing so far has convinced me it will become conscious and become Skynet or some type of digital god. I believe whatever advancements are made it will remain a tool.

There is a point of diminishing returns#

AI is like any other new technology. At the beginning there is an explosion of innovation and then as the industry matures things settle into a rhythm and improvements become smaller and predictable. Companies struggle to get people to adopt the newest model with just features alone. They begin to incentivize by cutting support or deliberately slowing down and disabling features in older products. My guess is we will arrive at the maturity stage of AI fairly soon. That is, if we are not there already. I think the next leaps in AI innovation will be in efficiency. Protests over datacenters may force companies to work on getting their models on smaller and smaller hardware instead of just making it smarter.

Those are my thoughts anyway. I guess I can come back in a year and see how well I scored on my predictions.