AI in 2026

The first time I heard about AI being used to code was towards the end of my internship at NVIDIA in 2021. I remember a co-worker bringing it up during one of our meetings. My initial thought was how would you even be able to train AI if a lot of code isn’t licensed for commercial use? Well, I think the answer to that is a lot of companies just really didn’t care about licensing and just scraped code from GitHub.

At the end of 2022, ChatGPT was released to the public. This was my first real attempt using AI as we use it today. I remember the first thing I did was generate a long winded essay about some random topic and replied to a user on Reddit with it. My goal being to see if I could get a reaction out of users for writing a multi-paragraph essay about the pointless topic. A lot of people did manage to catch on that I used AI to generate the essay.

I started using ChatGPT to code in 2023. I mostly asked it to verify my ideas or to generate me small snippets of code. It was another tool in my toolbox but I didn’t really reach for it very often.

As we move through 2025 and into 2026, I really enjoyed the AI autocompletion features in IDEs. It felt like the AI knew what I was trying to do and I was able to increase my productivity. I was sold and bought a subscription to GitHub Copilot. I slowly then started looking into prompting AI to generate larger and larger snippets of code. The results just kept getting better and better as newer models were released.

I am now at a point where I basically start off every single feature/ticket with AI. I use it either to find me some information on where to start, or just throw the entire problem at it if I know what I want to do. It works extremely well, and the results are usually very good. There are obviously situations where the AI will generate code that is suboptimal or just plain wrong, but it usually just requires a bit of refactoring to get it right.

There are a few negative aspects to using AI…

1. There are times where I didn’t fully understand the code that AI generated. A real embarrassing moment I had at work was when a senior asked me to explain a piece of code that I had generated using AI. I had no idea what it was doing and didn’t have an answer for him. I find that this will be a common problem as AI just generally increases the amount of code that we can write.
2. I find that a lot of people are using AI to communicate their messages and ideas. A lot of PRs are just completely generated by AI and I question the usefulness of that. If you are the one submitting the code, could you really not spend a few minutes writing out your intentions so you understand it and can explain it to others?
3. I don’t know how I would have handled university with AI. It’s definitely the evolution of the common joke about copying code from StackOverflow. I have a strong feeling that a lot of students will have a harder time learning the fundamentals of programming because they will just rely on AI to generate code for them.
4. The concept of interns/junior developers at companies has changed. You’d usually pawn off some easy task to an intern or junior developer, but now you can just have AI do it. A lot of companies have stopped hiring interns and junior developers because of this. It actually makes me quite excited as I’m a classically trained software engineer who will be able to fill the gaps when seniors begin to retire.
5. I find that it’s harder to get an understanding of the codebase when using AI. You’d usually have to read through the codebase and sift through files to find what you need. During this process, you’d usually learn a lot about the codebase and how it works. Now, you can usually just ask AI and it’ll give you the answer or find the file for you.

The software engineering industry has changed in the last few years and it will continue to change. I’m not too worried because if it’ll ever come to a point where AI can completely take over my work as a software engineer, man, AI will be able to do some absolutely incredible things. I don’t even know how the world would look like.