Happy new year!
Me and @alimgafar will be sharing our 2026 predictions this Friday on This Week In Meteor:
That said, given that we have some MeteorJS reveals at the end of the month:
We will be staying in more of the general tech area.
That said, please use this thread to make your predictions/wishes either for Meteor or general tech. If you share something interesting, we’ll make sure to mention it on the show.
AI won’t be as scary and we will better understand its capabilities and limits.
There will be maybe one major jump in model capabilities, but then I expect things to slow down and stabilize. Similarly to what we have seen 10 years ago in the JS ecosystem.
AI firings will not materialize, but it will reduce hiring.
There will be a crisis about junior developers.
Potential rumbling about re-structuring of the entire industry.
Open Source will change
As we have seen with Tailwind CSS, but public outcry won’t save every project.
O’sassy licence
The FOSS equilibrium has drastically shifted with AI and the benefits no longer outweigh the risks/detriments. => People won’t open up things and AI tools will deteriorate.
SASS companies will struggle more as for large customer it might be now easier and cheaper to get AI build solution just for them.
Agentic
Investors will start looking outside of AI scope
Disposable AI build apps
@alimgafar More devs will move back to vanilla JS, or at least talk about it.
Thanks to LLMs there won’t be a need to use expensive frameworks.
Frameworks will matter less as AI gets better
Improvements in standard libraries/vanilla
@storytelelr New CSS features will take center stage
Over the last 2 or so years there was a lot of new CSS becoming available.
This year we will see a lot of usage of the new capabilities.
Native carousels
WebGPU
More UI frameworks will migrate to these new CSS/HTML instead of JS for performance
@alimgafar GitHub will no longer be the center of the universe for developers
More project will move to Gitlab or Bitbucket
The more Microsoft extracts tolls on builders, and ingests their code for Co-pilot, the more developers will look for off-ramps that respect their work and gives meaningful value.
Enshitification of GitHub / Microsoft
@storyteller We won’t be able to escape geopolitics in tech anymore
It was already happening on American cultural grounds and some international conflicts that got attention in the west. - Due to the dominance of America in tech.
AI means that people no longer have to play nice in FOSS. Creating code is easier then ever. (Though creating software is still as difficult)
To many other people on the internet feel just like characters in a movie or video game.
Most people don’t understand what made our existing systems function.
Software Kindom is something between Open Source and Closed Source or closed developer cycle.
software kingdoms—that, under the control of the owner, contain code, information, and community, with access granted according to the terms of the circle’s ownership.
@alimgafar Computation capability is going to plateau for general audience
The cost of RAMs and GPUs will go through the roof due to buyouts from AI companies.
Death of Moore’s law in a sense.
There will be more pressure on the performance of games/apps to be under control so that things can run on older hardware.
We will see the rise of Linux on desktop to get more life out of old tech.
Planned obsolescence is going to become a major issue.
These are some really interesting projections, and I agree with many of them! I would add:
Rust/WASM is the new web standards hotness for computational processing
WebGPU supports running WebLLM in the browser!
Spec driven development is replacing agile; and we’re going to see disposable apps under 10K lines of code, and larger 500K or 1M line projects will become more common
Major refactoring is happening across countless codebases right now, as people pay down decades of technical debt
People also fast forwarding ancient projects.
2026 will be a year of necromancy and reviving dead projects that were abandoned years ago, and revisiting them with AI tools to get past roadblocks
proprietary data sets will become the new moats for startups
the open-source social contract isn’t dead; but the economics and market is substantially changing right now
