Software Engineering in 2026: Predictions from Leaders and Practitioners
Signals from the Hangar DX community on how AI is changing software engineering.
Software Engineering in 2026: Predictions from Leaders and Practitioners
Signals from the Hangar DX community on how AI is changing software engineering.
Ankit Jain
Ankit Jain is a Co Founder and CEO of Aviator, an AI-powereddeveloper workflow automation platform that automates ownership, code reviews, merges and deploys. He also leads The Hangar, a community of senior DevOps and senior software engineers focused on developer experience, and Xoogler, the ex-Google alumni network. Previously, he led engineering teams at Sunshine, Homejoy, and Shippo, and was also an engineer at Google and Adobe.
A Season of Insights: What We Learned from 21 Hangar DX Episodes
We explored how developer experience is evolving and how AI is reshaping what it means to be an engineer.
Migrating from Node.js 14 to 18: Vibe Coding vs. Spec-Driven Approach
Comparing two ways of completing the same upgrade: migrating a Node.js 14 project to Node.js 18 by chatting with an AI assistant and performing the same migration through a spec-driven development approach, with a strict, pre-written plan.
Spec-Driven Development: The Key to Scalable AI Agents
Spec-driven development is not a choice but a necessity as we move from vibe coding a cool app to building real-world brownfield projects.
The Future of Agentic Coding is Multiplayer
Building software with AI agents isn’t a solo sport, especially when projects touch multiple repos, services, and prompt engineering knowledge.
The Rise of Remote Agentic Environments
Runbooks capture context from repositories or code reviews, combine it with the team's AI prompting knowledge and get smarter with each use.
How Top Tech Teams Use AI To Boost Dev Productivity
AI is a developer productivity force multiplier, but poor documentation, unclear ownership and fragmented tooling don’t magically disappear with AI.
Fixing Engineering’s Biggest Time Waste: Finding Information
Developers’ workflows are fragmented, knowledge is siloed, ownership unclear, and coordination work is eating away at the time saved by AI.
Throwing AI at Developers Won’t Fix Their Problems
Systemic engineering bottlenecks won’t disappear by just throwing AI at them. You’ve got to fix the roadblocks to realize the full value of AI tools.
AI is Eating Developer Experience
Developer experience was about making developers happy. AI experience is about shortening the loop without loss of safety.
Platform Engineering Won’t Save You
If you’re helping developers ship software with less friction, congratulations, you’re already doing some form of platform engineering.
The Anti-Metrics Era of Developer Productivity
Instead of building shiny dashboards, let’s focus on automated workflows across the entire SDLC – development, code reviews, builds, tests, and deployments.
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