· AI Engineering · 2 min read
2026 Is When AI Starts to Feel Profound
Programming is the first field to feel the change. The rest of the economy will follow on a similar blueprint.
Welcome to 2026. AI is starting to make more profound impacts. It starts with programming. AI takes time to spread, just like any other technology before. Some fields get impacted earlier, some a bit later. Programming is one of the first fields, thanks to
- Vast training data
- Clear and fast feedback loop (either code works or doesn’t)
- Eager adoption from technically savvy users
I always see the best way to predict how AI will change your field (say accounting or cake baking) is to examine how AI is changing programming now.
2025, the ground started shifting for programming. Just a bit more than 1 year ago, GPT-o1, the first reasoning model was released. That name sounds like several years old, but it was actually released late 2024. Then Claude Code (an AI coding tool) was released. Then every month, the tools and the models keep improving. Now it is so reliable that I can break down any project of medium-difficulty into AI tools, and I will get a working solution.
The way it works now is:
- You describe the project, the motivation, the goal, the constraints, some technical guidance
- AI will break down the work, propose a detailed plan, with multiple phases, with decisions need to be made, and pro/con of each options.
- You have technical expertise in the field (you need this, without it, you will not go very far) to analyze the plan, and make critical decisions
- Then AI implements step by step. How rigorously you verify the code depends on how serious the project is.
AI for programming is so reliable now that as long as the plan is detailed enough, you will generally get a working output.
Other fields likely will have a similar process in the future. You walk together with AI to build a blueprint which takes time to build yourself, but quick to validate and approve. Then you will just let AI run the process, knowing it will be very reliable. Not now, but 1 or 2 years from now.
So keep applying AI to your field, one day it will come, and you are already at the front of the wave.
