Four Predictions for How AI Will Change Software in 2026

Tomorrow is the first day of 2026, and to give our listeners a view of the trends that’ll shape the year ahead, Dan Shipper had Every COO Brandon Gell on AI & I to discuss their predictions for what’s next. They discussed how software will be built, who will build it, and what it will take for truly autonomous AI agents to become a reality. If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share! Want even more? Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free. To hear more from Dan Shipper: Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper Timestamps: 00:00:00 — Start 00:01:05 — Introduction 00:01:34 — Reflections on Every’s growth over the past year 00:09:38 — What changes when a company grows from 20 to 50 people 00:11:55 — How agent-native architecture will change software in 2026 00:17:13 — Why designers are slated to become power users of AI 00:23:24 — The new kind of software engineer who will direct AI agents 00:33:42 — Why the next wave of AI training will focus on autonomy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Shipper?

  Let's get into our 2026 predictions. I think AI progress is still really fast and it's kind of mind blowing where we are now versus where we were a year ago. And I think that will be the case in at the end of 2026. I think we'll be sitting here being like, wow, it's like actually a lot better. And the world and AGI, however you define that, is a lot more complicated and hard than we thought. And we will not have AGI in 2027. I think for the most part, if you are an engineer who wants to incorporate AI into your process, but doesn't want to reinvent the skill of software engineering, there's going to be a home and a job for you for a very long time, actually. The big AI CEOs like Dario and Sam Altman in 2024 said that 2025 would be the year of agents and it really was like, we got there, we did it.

• 0:44Dan Shipper?

  I think Sam said like, it's less than a thousand days away, maybe like a year ago. So that's in two years and now their timelines have shifted.

• 1:05Dan Shipper?

  For people who don't know, Brandon is our fearless COO at Everi.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  It's true. It's true.

• 1:11Dan Shipper?

  I'm super psyched to do this episode. I'm psyched to do it with Brandon and also just psyched to get to reflect on 2025 and make some predictions for 2026. 2025 was just like, it was the year for us. It was, it was this breakout year. And if you look at our, our like revenue chart, it's so interesting because like we're six years into this business. The first like four or five months, it was like straight up into the right. And we were like, this is fucking amazing. This is business.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  And what was, what was that business?

• 1:48Dan Shipper?

  It was like, it was a bundle of newsletters. And so it was just people just subscribing specifically for newsletters. We would add new newsletters to the bundle and it would grow. It was like at the beginning of COVID. And so we were like, this is amazing. We're gonna be rich. And then basically for like another four and a half, five years, it was just like more or less flat. Like if you really zoom out, it was more or less flat, which was difficult. And there are, there are a lot of like false starts and moments like where it looked like it was getting better and then it was started getting worse or just stay the same. And I think like year over year, it did kind of grow a little bit, but like for all intents and purposes, like there was no progress made in the business from

• 2:33Dan Shipper?

  a just a revenue perspective. And then this year, it's just like, we just totally bent the curve. And specifically starting in like, I think, starting in June, we basically doubled the business. So we're at like about, we're about 150 K MRR. And we were at, I think in the 60s, like mid 60s to 70s, starting in June. So there's just something like really big happened. And it's so fun to watch this thing that has been in this gestational period for five years, like suddenly start to break out.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  Well, I think it was our, was it our first Claude Code Camp?

• 3:11Dan Shipper?

  That in June? That was one, I think, honestly, I think what it, what happened was in June, we really had built this engine that was ready to get people to subscribe. So basically, we had the newsletter. And then we had, we had a couple different of our AI software apps in market. So I think we had launched Cora in June.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  I think Cora was June.

• 3:35Dan Shipper?

  That was in June. And then in Cora is our, our AI email assistant. We had Sparkle, we had a version of Spire, which is our, our AI Ghostwriter. And then I don't think we had Monologue yet, but we had three, we had three products in market. And so it was, it was this really meaty subscription because you pay one price, you could access everything you make. But we needed like a couple moments to like almost reintroduce ourselves to the business. And so we had that launch moment with Cora. We did a Claude Code Camp, which is like, basically, that was like when Claude Code was breaking, was starting to break out, and we sort of noticed it. And we started to do these live webinars called Claude Code Camps for subscribers. But the big thing was I went on Lenny's podcast.

• 4:18Dan Shipper?

  And that was like in June and that was one of those moments where it was like, oh, it I think it reset some of people's expectations about whatever is and what you can get from it. And and so we grew like 20% that month and it has just like basically been that way since then.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  We grew 22.63% that month after consistently growing between 1 and 5% for years.

• 4:41Dan Shipper?

  Well, here's here's what's really interesting, what people should know is we started growing like about 5% month over month, starting in like, maybe, let me see, let's look at this, it's like, we started going about like a couple percent month or month between like 2 and 5% month of a month, starting in May of 2024. That's actually when the growth.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  That's weird. What else happened?

• 5:06Dan Shipper?

  Brandon joined.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  Wow, you can really see.

• 5:12Dan Shipper?

  See the date that I joined here. And so, once Brandon joined, it just the curve like started to consistently bend up. It was like starting to go up. And then, and so I think the business at that point was starting to like reconfigure around this whole thing that that we started to started to build together. And and then it needed like a moment to catalyze it and like sort of light it on fire. And I think that was like the Lenny podcast moment.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  And what's been interesting after that is it has consistently delivered. So after the Lenny podcast, we've grown at least 10% each month. We've had a bunch of other launches since then, but I do think the biggest thing was a rejiggering in people's brains of what every actually is from a newsletter to a bundle. And we're not even there yet. Like, that's going to be what 2026 is really, really about.

• 6:03Dan Shipper?

  Totally. And I think.

• 6:07Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, it it sort of um it sort of became a real company too. So we were, I think, at the at the beginning of the year, we were like maybe five people or something like that, five people whole time. And now we're almost twenty. And um that has been, that is

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Also have a huge consulting business now.

• 6:25Dan Shipper?

  Consulting business that's not even counted in the MRR. And that's honestly been um it's been so fun.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:33Dan Shipper?

  Because I think we're really figuring out what it means to be an AI-first business ourselves. And then we get to bring that to readers to like people who use our products, because we build tools for ourselves that we can sell to sell to subscribers um and and bring it to big companies in the consulting business. And it's just like, it's the most exciting thing I've ever done.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  What's what's one word to describe twenty twenty five?

• 6:58Dan Shipper?

  Uh, the word that came to my head was fire. I don't know.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  In a good way or is that like?

• 7:03Dan Shipper?

  In a good way, it was good fire. Like, we we start, we like lit the engines, right? And so like

• 7:07Speaker 01

  The engines are lit.

• 7:08Dan Shipper?

  Liftoff. Yeah, let's say liftoff is is the word.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  I don't even know. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. I really think we've like, I don't even think the engine is on. I think we've like primed the engine. And twenty twenty six is going to be where we really like, you know, in the grand scheme of every, we're just going to be putting it into first. We're going to think we're putting it into, you know, fifth.

• 7:28Dan Shipper?

  That's the thing about these curves is every time you hit a new inflection point, the old curve looks really small and shitty. And um so I think right now, the one we're on, we're like, this is amazing. But I definitely agree in twenty twenty six. The thing that we're gonna do is every has been this very bottoms up place for a long time where we're doing the newsletter and we're sort of writing whatever we're interested in, and we're building tools, and we're just sort of building whatever tools come to our head that we kind of need ourselves. And I think we're starting to um build a more, much more cohesive platform. So um we brought in someone uh really talented, and his name is Willie, who is bill building the every platform where we have

• 8:07Dan Shipper?

  we have single sign on, so you can log into any one of our apps. We have now we have unified billing, so you don't have to enter your credit card information for each one of the apps. But that's sort of like the groundwork. And what we're doing next year is um We're gonna build this like unified memory and context layer where we have.

• 8:25Dan Shipper?

  We have a bunch of, basically, we can collect everything, everything that you care about and who you are into one place and all of the apps and all the content can take that into account as they work with you. So it's like a, it's a much more custom personalized AI experience across all the different services.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  I think the biggest, one of the biggest challenges for us next year will be. I describe every as like the most genuine work environment that I know of.

• 8:51Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  The things that we build are the things that like any one of us is like, this is interesting. I need it. It's cool.

• 8:56Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  And then we build it. And that has like served us really well. We get to build cool things, but then write about it and, and we build things that we need.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  And we're gonna like start to have like a real strategy.

• 9:10Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Next year, which like, we haven't not had, but we've been doing it like based off of what's genuinely interesting.

• 9:17Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  And it's gonna be, I think one of the big challenges will be like continually being genuine and also like having a strategy and having personas of the types of people that we want to like attract towards every. And not losing that like genuine motivation that we have to just like make cool shit.

• 9:34Dan Shipper?

  I agree. What was like for you, like, so this is actually, this is the first time I've run a business with 20 people. But you've run a business, your last business, you got to about like 100 employees, I think.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Hundred, yeah.

• 9:46Dan Shipper?

  What was the transition like from like 20 to 50?

• 9:49Speaker 01

  You have to rebuild the business every time the number of people doubles. And we felt that. I mean, we've, we've done that a little bit from like five to 10 and now we're at 20 and like, you know, we just went through and changed everything. So every time the business doubles, it changes. You have to rethink operationally how everything works and just sometimes the whole strategy.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  And then you just sort of need to have like people do their job really, really well. And when you're smaller, everybody's sort of doing everything because you have one person doing support and one person doing design. And then as you scale, like, uh, it, what I mean by that is like, sometimes you need the design person to also help with support. And, um, and then as you scale, like, people start to just do very specific things.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  And I found it that like, it's a real challenge to keep the culture going where everyone feels like equally as excited about the company and like they play a very big role in it. Because you end up just hiring some people where they're just like, I just do support for this company.

• 10:55Dan Shipper?

  Right.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  You know?

• 10:56Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  And so keeping that genuine interest in building stuff and exploring things is what makes us special and will be the, the big challenge as we scale.

• 11:09Dan Shipper?

  I totally agree.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  But I, I don't really think we're gonna, like, I think we'll hire next year, but I don't think we're gonna hire a ton. Like, the whole thing is like, keep it small.

• 11:16Dan Shipper?

  I hope so. Yeah, I hope so. Cause I love just.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  It's amazing.

• 11:19Dan Shipper?

  I love all the people that we work with and every time I go into a meeting, I'm like, wow, all these people are so cool and interesting and have interesting backgrounds and stuff to say, and I really don't want that to change.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  And I don't think you need to anymore because AI is allowing us to scale the same number of people, essentially.

• 11:34Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. Um, speaking of which, uh, let's get into our 2026 predictions. I know you have some doomer takes.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  I got a couple doomer takes.

• 11:42Dan Shipper?

  Which is good, because I'm, I'm usually like pretty sunny and optimistic, so it'll be a good, good balance. Uh, Rachel, our producer said, um, that we're gonna do a good cop, bad cop routine. So do you want to start?

• 11:51Speaker 01

  I don't only want to do.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Um, I'll, I'll start with a positive take and, and this is actually inspired by a conversation that we had, which is that agentic development will be maybe by the end of the year inside of the app that you're actually using. You said that to me and like completely blew my mind.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  And we're already doing that. So what I, what I mean by that is like, uh, the, inside of every right now, we build a product. If something isn't working, you can DM, Dan's building a tool that does this right now. You can DM this tool or mention it in a Discord channel and say, hey, I want this feature or this bug is broken and it will write some code and then submit a PR for it. So it's sort of like working inside of Discord, but the next step of this is that I can do it inside of the app itself and then it can like write the code in a way that doesn't break it and then actually like relaunch the app itself with a feature that I might

• 12:53Speaker 01

  specifically want. And that just feels really fucking hard to do, but kind of inevitable.

• 13:00Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, no, I agree. I think like the way that I've been, I've been talking about it and thinking about it is we reached this place at the end of 2025 where coding agents are really good and mostly the code they write works, which is, was not the case last year. It was, you could, you could get pretty far, but eventually you get stuck into a bunch of errors and bugs. And so if you're not a professional developer, it would like just break. And now you can kind of with Opus, especially the Opus 4.5, you can kind of like keep going forever almost, especially if you're using stuff like our compound engineering plugin and you're, you're actually like having it plan and think and all that kind of stuff. It's like, it's really good. So I think that fundamentally changes software

• 13:42Dan Shipper?

  engineering and it also fundamentally changes how apps are built and who they are built by. And so I've been kind of playing with this new idea for how software is architected that is very inspired by Claude Code that I've been calling agent native architectures. And in agent native architecture, the like first level of, of an agent native architecture is anything inside of an app that the user can do, the agent can do. So in Claude Code, anything you can do in Claude Code where you're like, oh, I want to, please go, you know, or in Claude Code, it's anything you can do on your computer Claude can do. So like if you want to change files or, you know, write, write a file or run a server or whatever Claude can do all those things. And mostly, most of the agents that we use

• 14:27Dan Shipper?

  right now, that's not the case. So if you go into, for example, one of our apps, Cora, the, the agent that you can talk to, there's many things you can do inside of the Cora app that the agent can't do itself.

• 14:41Dan Shipper?

  And same thing as a lot of other like sort of chat agents, like chat apps, basically. And so I think the first step of agent in a development is anything you can do, the agent can do. And that gives this like power and flexibility to the application because

• 14:57Dan Shipper?

  you can just tell the agent to go do stuff. So like, you know, oh, I want to change my settings. Right. I've been doing that all the time now with with the Atlas browser. It makes kind of makes every app a little bit agent native. So if I I get requests all the time where people are like, oh, my God, like, can you update this? Like setting or like add me to this team or whatever. And I'm like, I don't want to figure out this interface. And I just asked Atlas to do it. I think every app, like every agent in Apple have that as a first level. Second level is anything that the code in the app can do, because there's many pieces of code that the user cannot trigger themselves, any piece of code that the app can do, the agent can do. So that's a lot of like, so for example, in Cora, users can't really like generate their briefs.

• 15:41Dan Shipper?

  And briefs are the summaries of their emails.

• 15:45Dan Shipper?

  Eventually, what should happen is the agent should have the ability to like regenerate and redo an entire, entire brief and entire summary and whatever, whatever way that they want. Maybe triggered by the user, maybe triggered by the developer. The third one is, yeah, anything a developer can do, the user, the agent can do. So the user can be like, I want to customize my software in this way. The agent is going to go submit it. And maybe it's a bug fix that goes out to everyone, or maybe there's maybe there's some system by which you can

• 16:14Dan Shipper?

  you can just have your own custom version of any of that. And we're already starting to do this inside of every, and it seems like it's sort of starting to work. And I just, I think that's going to be broadly distributed, like especially that first level is going to be a broadly distributed paradigm in a year that no one's really talking about right now, except for, except for Anthropic. I think Anthropic has nailed this, but everyone else is going to be doing it.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  I think Notion is doing that pretty well, too. Yeah, I mean, you can, you can use the notion AI to like do to create almost anything that you would create.

• 16:41Dan Shipper?

  Yes, there are, I think they also get it. They're like really thinking about this in the right way where it's not just software that's made for humans to collaborate that they've like pasted agents into. It's like actually agents and humans are like first class citizens in the app.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:59Dan Shipper?

  Let's keep going.

• 17:01Dan Shipper?

  What's my, what's my prediction? Let me see, I have a note file. Okay. Oh, this is a good one.

• 17:10Dan Shipper?

  I think that designers are the next big

• 17:18Dan Shipper?

  superheroes of the AI age, like they have been uniquely enabled in this world because

• 17:25Dan Shipper?

  forever designers have, what they're good at is they have lots of taste and they have like a vision for how they want an app to work. And they've just bumped up against like, well, I have to convince this developer to do this for me. For a long time and I just see, so a good example is Lucas, our creative, our creative director inside of every.

• 17:45Dan Shipper?

  He has turned into this machine where he's not only like this incredibly creative designer, art director kind of person, he's also like vibe coding little apps that let him do his work better. And I just think there's like, there's a whole class of people that are sort of like Lucas, where there are these highly creative, highly visual people who have been held back from making full experiences because they can't code that now we're going to be able to code and the stuff they can make. Because code is cheap, being able to make a really beautiful, really evocative, well thought through experience is going to be a huge deal. And I think all these designers are just going to like start going crazy and it's going to become this new archetype of like really interesting builder.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Cursor, I mean, I think is already inching towards that you could do, you can, you can do front end updates inside of cursor with like a visual medium. I, I sort of think, I get a little bit worried that like,

• 18:44Speaker 01

  so I, I used to be afraid of the terminal and like a lot of people are afraid of the terminal, like it sounds like a scary word. And I kind of wonder if like doing design inside of cursor, a lot of designers will be like, no, I like, that's scary to me. I can't touch the code. I don't want to mess anything up. So I wonder how that will play out. Next year so that like, you know, the best designers in the world will be doing this, but like you need to build a product that like every designer can, you know, can access. So

• 19:16Speaker 01

  I wonder how they'll abstract it, the cursor, you know, if they want to expand their market away from just. Engineers to designers like they may need to abstract it away from the code so that like the average person doesn't get scared going near code.

• 19:33Dan Shipper?

  What's next?

• 19:34Speaker 01

  Okay, I have one.

• 19:35Dan Shipper?

  You're a hot take.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  I have a bit of a doomer take, which is that I am really worried that, okay, I so like I just have a bunch of friends, my mom, let's say my mom, who's also my friend. If she sees something on Instagram and it's, I'll tell you the exact story I'm thinking of. She sent me a video of some gorillas that were taking care of their children. And the point of the video was like, wow, gorillas, they're so human like, look at the way they're taking care of their kids. And it looked totally real. My mom sent it to me and was like, this is so cute. And I was like, Mom, that's just not real. That's AI. And she refused to believe me.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  She was like, that's, you know, what are you talking about? This is real.

• 20:23Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  And I just think it's really scary that a lot of these social media companies, all of them, which are heavily invested in AI working.

• 20:30Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  Aren't putting made by AI, you know, as a thing. And I just think that that is going to be something that will have to happen. If not by the midterms, then by the next election year, presidential election. But yeah, I think midterms are going to be like kind of scary. Because I think there's going to be deep fakes, which used to be a really scary word. And now nobody talks about, nobody says deep fake anymore.

• 21:03Dan Shipper?

  So what is the like specific, so I agree with you. I think this is a huge problem and I think it's right to point it out. And that example of your mom like actually not believing it's AI is really interesting to me because for me, I look at it and I'm like, I, I can tell, but I know that that's, I look at this shit all day. So that makes sense. What's like the specific doomer take? Like, what do you think?

• 21:23Speaker 01

  The doomer take is that shit's going to go bad during an election cycle and that's going to be the inspiration. But the really, the really doomer take is that it's Going to go well for the team that, you know, then has to make the rule to not.

• 21:36Dan Shipper?

  I see.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  You know, to label stuff.

• 21:38Dan Shipper?

  And what specifically do you think is going to happen? Is it going to be like, uh, uh, they're, they're, they come up with a video of a politician like getting caught, you know, doing something.

• 21:50Dan Shipper?

  It's like the pee tape, but like real.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. I think that, I think that scary stuff is going to happen where fake videos are made. Like, you know, the, the, the nature of the word deep fake came from like people doing like really grotesque things that like they didn't actually do. But AI made it look like they, they did that. And I think that like, we are just like so, there's just like a thin wall that's blocking the average person from making videos like that.

• 22:19Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  And if you really want to, you can like, I've never tried, but you probably could easily go make like really messed up videos. And, uh, that is going to happen hundred percent. So I think like, that's my do or take is something's going to happen with elections that like, that's, that's, that's what will trigger, um, you know, some sort of label that's like made with AI.

• 22:46Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  I also think another, another interesting thing that's happening is this deal that Disney just did with, uh, with OpenAI. To put Disney characters into, into Sora, which is really just going to like sort of cha- train all of us to expect, it's a little bit confusing because Disney characters, many of them aren't real anyway.

• 23:07Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  But like, we're just going to be like really used to like not real stuff.

• 23:14Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  Soon.

• 23:14Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. Okay, let's keep going. So, um, my next prediction is I have been observing this split in software engineering.

• 23:32Dan Shipper?

  And it's, uh, I think there's like now basically three types of software engineers. Uh, maybe there's four types. One type is just traditional engineer never use AI, which I think is getting less and less, but like they're definitely still a thing. It's definitely, they're definitely still there are super skeptical, all that kind of stuff. But the more interesting thing are the, are the other three. I think, um, Mostly what people are talking about and think about are two groups. One is traditional engineers who use AI in their process and they're kind of, they're using cursor. They're probably using Claude code, but like really they, they still think like traditional engineers. But they're using AI as this sort of like accelerant to their, their normal engineering process.

• 24:15Dan Shipper?

  So they're still reading code, maybe they're still writing it, but like they're, they're deeply involved in every aspect of the software. So that's one. Second one is vibe coders who are at the opposite end of the spectrum, which is, I don't even know how to code. I'm just like making something that I don't understand. Yeah. And I think that, that's like the, the classic dichotomy between the two types of coding that's happening. But I think there's a third way that I think we're starting to see inside of every and is really, I think Anthropic is really leading the way on this and OpenAI has not yet really caught up to it. I think OpenAI is really right now for a lot of their coding tools is serving the like traditional engineer who's incorporating AI.

• 24:55Dan Shipper?

  The third way is what we would probably call compound engineers or maybe more broadly is agentic engineers, who are engineers that are rein, have reinvented software engineering as a skill for an agent world, where they are not looking at the code, they are not ever writing any code. They are fully committed to delegating all of the actual programming work to, to the AI, to an AI agent. And they're like moving up a level in the stack to essentially manage a single or multiple agents all at once. And they've sort of, they've decided to make that trade off of, because I think a lot, a lot of programmers,

• 25:37Dan Shipper?

  and I understand this, like a lot of programmers love writing code and they've decided to make that trade off of like getting rid of this old skill, which has, I think for them, a lot of them, they feel like it has started to atrophy in, in exchange for this other skill. And I think many traditional engineers who are using AI don't want to do that because they love writing code. And I think many companies are not aware that they have a choice here because they're trying to serve. If you're, if you're trying to Sell enterprise software contracts right now, you're going to run into a lot of traditional engineers who wanna wanna incorporate AI into the process but not reinvent it. And so I think a lot of companies are missing this group that I think we're a part of and and a couple other people are where

• 26:19Dan Shipper?

  it's small companies that are reinventing what software engineering is from the ground up. And that will be its own skill. It's it's not vibe coding. So and I would say vibe coding is like very amateurish. And it but it's definitely not engineering with AI. It's like it's a third thing. And I think that's gonna be a big deal in in twenty twenty six.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  And what's gonna happen to all of those engineers that refuse to get on board?

• 26:47Dan Shipper?

  I I think it's a good question. My my sense is that this kind of thing takes a while to move through an entire economy. And so I think for the most part, if you are an engineer who wants to incorporate AI into your process, but doesn't wanna reinvent the skill of software engineering, there's going to be a home and a job for you for a very long time, actually.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 27:12Dan Shipper?

  And I think if you if you then zoom out, though, that kind that style of engineering is gonna be on a pretty slow and steady decline.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:21Dan Shipper?

  Um, in the same way that, I don't know, like the newspaper industry was affected by the internet. It wasn't like all at once, but like over time, it's become like less, less and less.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:30Dan Shipper?

  Less and less profitable as a as a as a business for specifically for like the old cost structures of newspapers.

• 27:38Dan Shipper?

  And if you look at the growth, the growth will be in this new kind of engineering, in this new kind of engineering work. And so if you're, for example, a new grad and you're choosing between what what kind of stuff you're gonna do, I think you're probably gonna be more likely to to choose this third path.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  But it will be interesting. Like, I wonder how many schools are still like I studied architecture and they still had a draw by hand.

• 27:59Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  Which was like a good skill to have, but so useless in the real world. And so like we all had to teach ourselves Revit and AutoCAD.

• 28:06Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  So I do wonder like how these schools are gonna.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Adjust.

• 28:11Dan Shipper?

  It's gonna be hard to that. And hopefully, you know, that's why we do all this, all these courses and training at every and we have a lot of like student discounts and stuff like that. And it's not a replacement for any of that, but I, I think there are a lot of people will pop up to like, serve that need for kids that are not being served by universities.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  And also the best engineers that at least we've seen are also very, very good traditional engineers.

• 28:33Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  They've just adopted this new way of building.

• 28:34Dan Shipper?

  Totally. Yeah. Uh, like Naveen, who runs Monologue is a good example of that.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. All of them. All of them are.

• 28:40Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  You know, they really are. So what about, um, what do we think's gonna happen with all of our non-technical friends out there that use chat GPT? And like, use it to like pull up recipes, but don't really use it at work. Maybe they like drop in a CSV and like do some analysis, but like they don't actually. Will 2026 be the year that like AI is just something that we as non-technical people natively use inside of products? Or are we still gonna be sort of like in this world where I mostly just use it to like make turn pictures into like, like drawings for my kid to use?

• 29:17Dan Shipper?

  Um.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Cause the, and, and I have, I mean, I've got a bunch of friends. I just had dinner with a friend yesterday who was like, yeah, like this AI thing, like it's just not working for me. And I was like, well, you're not an engineer like that. We know for sure.

• 29:30Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  That is a thing.

• 29:31Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. Who was this person? Like, where do they work or what do they do?

• 29:34Speaker 01

  They run, uh, the deal desk at Twilio. So they work at a really big publisher company. Um, they do a lot of math or they have Excel that does a lot of math.

• 29:44Dan Shipper?

  What's a deal desk?

• 29:45Speaker 01

  Deal desk is like, um, if a salesperson comes to you and is like, I have a big deal, but they want a discount. The deal desk at a big company is like, tell them no.

• 29:54Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  Yes, they can do 10%.

• 29:56Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  Um, so, you know, it's a lot of Excel work.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  And I, it's probably more sophisticated than that. If you're listening to this podcast, Graham, so I apologize.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  I, uh, I, I just wonder if next year, cause it feels inevitable. Like, will we leapfrog to like the point where Graham no longer has a job? Or will we steadily get there? Because, uh, he starts using AI a ton himself.

• 30:29Dan Shipper?

  That's a good question. I, um, okay, here's, here's, you're, you're opening up some like interesting threads for 2026. One is, I think we will definitely see layoffs that companies blame on AI in 2026. And I think mostly they will not be actually AI related. It will be about the underlying business, but they'll use AI as a good excuse.

• 30:52Dan Shipper?

  I think generally people like Graham, and I don't know really that much about his job, but um,

• 30:58Dan Shipper?

  I would guess that they will find it valuable this year, specifically because coding agents are good enough that once they make their way into Excel in a widely distributed way, he'll be like, holy shit, I can't believe it.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Right. It needs to be in his place of work.

• 31:10Dan Shipper?

  Exactly.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  It's not really in his place of work yet.

• 31:12Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. Um, and uh, I also think there's, there are always these uh, tailwinds and headwinds. So like there's, there's always, sometimes it's like, wow, AI is like blowing up and everything. We're improving so fast. And I'm, we're starting to see right now this like, oh, is it improving as fast as we thought it would? And I think um,

• 31:37Dan Shipper?

  we've started to see over the last year or so, the, the big AI CEOs like Dario and Sam Altman in 2024 said that 2025 would be the year of agents. And it really was like, we got, we got there, we did it. But they've also been saying like AGI is like very, uh, it's, it's, I think Sam said like it's less than a thousand days away. Maybe like a year ago. So that's in two years and now their timelines have shifted.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:04Dan Shipper?

  And so I think there's this really interesting thing happening where um, two things are true and that tends to get lost, which is

• 32:13Dan Shipper?

  one, I think AI progress is still really fast and it's uh, it's, it's kind of mind blowing where, where we are now versus where we were a year ago. And I think that will be the case in, at the end 2026. I think we'll be sitting here being like, wow, it's like actually a lot better. And the world and AGI, whatever, however you define that is a lot more complicated and hard than we thought.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:35Dan Shipper?

  And uh, and so, and we will not have AGI in 2027.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  Also, what even is it? Like, what even is AGI? I mean, I just remember a couple of years ago, I was like, yeah, AGI is a thing. It's when like the robots like they know everything and they can talk to you. And now I'm like, what was I thinking? Like, I would say we have AGI right now. It's just that like, it needs to be able to continue to live on and run and like propagate inside of my computer and do things that like, I don't have to request that it does.

• 33:03Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  Like, the models can do that right now. Like Claude Code can run for hours to do shit and, you know, fix problems that it makes. Um, it's just, I feel like it doesn't have the tools to like live on indefinitely. And like never really turn off. To me, AGI is like, a model that never actually really turns off. The conversation, might just be the fact that like I have to go to a window in a browser to like engage with it. The conversation never really ends.

• 33:30Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  That to me, that's, you know, Brandon's version of AGI.

• 33:33Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, yeah, that's, that's, that's been my definition of it too is like, um, it, uh, you, if you, uh, think about it from the perspective of human or childhood development. As child, as children get older, they get more and more autonomous on a fairly linear curve. Um, I don't know if it's linear, but it's, it's a predictable curve and you can like leave them alone for like, if they're young, they're even with them for like five minutes, with a monitor. Um, but as they get older, they have more and more time. Um, where they're, they can go play in their room for 10 minutes and nothing's gonna like, they're not gonna die. Um, and I think AI has been very similar, like, three years ago, ChatGPT is like one turn. Now Claude Code and, and, um,

• 34:15Dan Shipper?

  you know, ChatGPT Pro like can run for 20 minutes to like an hour at a time. Um, but that's actually quite far away from, they just run indefinitely. And it's worth it. It's economically profitable and worthwhile for you to pay for it to be constantly doing stuff without you like always telling it, here's what, here's what to do. Um, and I think we're, I think that's actually a very complicated problem because it requires continuous learning. Um, it requires the agent to have like a good sense of what its goals are and also to be able to modify its goals in ways that make sense. And these agents have these little quirks in the way that they learn and the, and their common sense that, start to add up over time. And so what they would do diverges a lot from what, what,

• 34:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:59Dan Shipper?

  uh, I would do basically, or any human would do.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  And it kind of like, it, it starts with a seedling and like, an hour later, they're like,

• 35:06Dan Shipper?

  Exactly.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  the world.

• 35:07Dan Shipper?

  Exactly. Um, and so I think we're getting better and better at that, but there's all this stuff that,

• 35:13Dan Shipper?

  you know, we, we, for example, we do a lot of, um, alignment, training, which is like essentially, Making the model be predictable and to do exactly what you say and and a flip side of that is like sick fancy where it's just like telling you what you want to hear. And I think we we're gonna have to get into a mode where

• 35:35Dan Shipper?

  they need to have their own sense of like agency and almost like individual personhood in order to have more in order to be skilled at being autonomous because you have to like go let them play around and mess up in ways that I think we've been hesitant to let them do for like safety reasons. So I think that's gonna actually happen a lot more in in 2026 is is we're gonna use training approaches and architectures that allow them to like go off and do stuff. That's very vague prediction, but that's that's what I got. So we're close to time. Rachel, I just wanna just check in with you, see how we're doing, see if like there's anywhere else you want us to go before we close.

• 36:10Speaker 02

  Awesome. You're good to go.

• 36:13Dan Shipper?

  Sweet. Well, Happy New Year. We'll see you next year.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  See everyone.

• 36:25Speaker 03

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