Software Engineering in 2026: Predictions from Leaders and Practitioners
Signals from the Hangar DX community on how AI is changing software engineering.
Software engineering is changing faster than most of us are comfortable predicting. A couple of months ago I wrote about what I imagine software engineering will look like in 2027. Some of those things are already happening in reality.
So, instead of boldly forecasting what software engineering will look like in 2026, I thought it’s better to share the most interesting insights and signals from people deep in the works, leaders and practitioners who were guests on the Hangar DX podcast.
One theme kept resurfacing: what it means to be a software engineer will keep changing.
Fascinating Problems to Solve
Uncertainty about the future is widespread, but it doesn’t automatically translate into pessimism. Annie Vella’s blog post about the software engineering identity crisis went viral, but she sees the current ambiguity as an opportunity.
We don’t know what the future of engineering looks like.
By this time next year, we might have architect-agents that design systems better than we do. Agents may remote-desktop into environments and build end-to-end.
The skill focus is shifting away from models themselves toward the systems that surround them.
If you want to stay technical, my strongest advice is to learn how to build software that uses AI. Not how to build the LLM, but how to build systems around it.
Those systems introduce new, unresolved challenges.
There’s a huge gap in guardrails, memory, agent safety, and secure orchestration. The next generation of engineers will define those patterns.
This career isn’t dying. It’s evolving fast, and there are fascinating problems to solve. The engineers who stay open-minded about where they add value will thrive.
From Vibes to Real-World Impact
AI agents are not a short-lived trend, but a structural change in how software gets built. Matt Biilman, CEO of Netlify, coined the term AX, Agent Experience, as a next step from User Experience and Developer Experience. According to him, we are at the beginning of a longer cycle of creating software for agents:
We’re at the start of the decade of agents. In 2026, we’ll see real-world impact get to the point where they start going deeper into how we work on them.
Matt says early excitement will give way to more grounded outcomes.
I think the initial hype of vibe coding will be replaced with the massive actual impact of people starting to realize that they can build software for all kinds of purposes now.
That impact depends on significant platform work behind the scenes.
But we’ll also realize how much work from a platform level we need to put in place for people to be able to use agents in professional contexts where they’re trying to work with existing legacy code bases and data sources.
For Matt, the most significant change is who gets to participate in building software.
I’m pretty excited for how that will change people’s relationship to not just being consumers of software but creators of software.
Dev Jobs Are Becoming Ops Jobs
As AI takes on more implementation work, the role of the engineer moves up a layer. Patrick Debois, ‘the godfather of DevOps’, who has been speaking lately a lot about the new generation of ‘AI native developers’
The job of software engineer is definitely changing with AI. The abstraction is different: I’m no longer typing the code myself; I’m instructing AI to do it. That means I still need to know what ‘good’ looks like, but my role shifts from producer to supervisor.
He compares the shift happening to the change that DevOps brought:
I sometimes jokingly say that dev jobs are becoming ops jobs.In the old days, I was receiving war files, jar files, whatever packages they were sending to me, and I had to deploy this as a sys admin. I had no intimate knowledge about what the code was doing. And still I was responsible to do kind of the operations.
Companies Will Hire Juniors Again
These shifts are already influencing how companies evaluate engineers. Angie Jones, VP of Engineering at Block, says that things are moving so fast that she tries not to make predictions anymore, but she’s started seeing one unexpected shift:
I’m noticing that companies are hiring junior engineers again. With AI tools, junior developers can produce incredibly strong work.
I don’t look at resumes anymore. I look at your portfolio and want to see what you’ve built with AI.
What About Engineering Leaders?
Meri Williams, CTO at Pleo, outlines two very different possibilities for them:
In the next 10-15 years I’m either going to be a CTO going around cleaning up after AI, or maybe they’re not going to need people like me anymore because we’re just going to write the specs and generate the whole app from scratch every time.
The uncertainty itself is part of what makes the transition interesting.
“It’s going to be really fascinating to find out which way it goes.”
