2026 Predictions

In 2025, context engineering jumped into the limelight. That’s because LLM calls do their best work with relevant and concise data. In 2026, we’ll see more context-delivering solutions pop up, and getting it right will be a make or break for companies building AI apps. No pressure.

In 2026, agents won’t struggle with reasoning. They’ll struggle with finding the right data. Today, apps have to piece together context across systems like vector stores, long-term memory, session state, SQL, and more.

Miss the right data? Your app fails. Send it too much info? It gets expensive and unbearably slow. And that’s if your app even works in the first place.

Context engines get it right by offering one abstraction layer that stores, indexes, and serves every kind of data. Structured, unstructured, short-term, long-term, and more all in one place.

We predict less latency, fewer surprises, and seamless scaling courtesy of context engineering.

Every major vendor launched a framework last year. Things will keep heating up in 2026. Collaborative ecosystems will overpower hype.

If agent frameworks were musical equipment, 2025 was the year everyone bought a synth. Now, we get to find out who the rockstars are and who won’t make it past practicing in their basement.

In 2026, we’ll see consolidation around two or three AI framework winners. Dev muscle memory is a powerful thing: Once a framework fits your brain, switching feels like rewriting all your aliases. So whoever delivers the most robust ecosystem will win.

Integrations, community energy, plug-ins, memory layers, RAG pipelines, and all the stuff that makes apps feel less like demos will separate the followers from the leaders.

LangGraph’s early momentum and tight integration in agent orchestration and memory has the company well-positioned to claim one of those top spots.

But Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and OpenAI didn’t exactly show up in 2025 to sit quietly. Microsoft Agent Framework, Google's Agent Development Kit, Amazon's Strands SDK and OpenAI's Agents SDK are all poised to make waves within the next year.

The frameworks that stay open—extensible, interoperable, unfussy—will be the ones that stick. Think less “walled garden” and more “everyone bring your own Lego® set.”

Think about what Excel did for spreadsheets, but on steroids. Excel let everyone run data-powered reports without writing structured queries. Likewise, the knowledge gap for building software will disappear. If you can dream it, you’ll be able to build it—fast.

Starting this year, new devs will have something older generations didn’t: countless AI coding assistants. Each agent will combine the energy of an eager intern with the knowledge of an experienced dev. Entry-level devs won’t write every line on their own. Instead, they’ll pull the strings and ship 10x more code without needing more caffeine.

And then there are the “consumer devs.” People who have never touched a codebase and won't have to because LLMs will handle the heavy lifting. Thanks to built-in coding tools in platforms like ChatGPT, anyone with an idea can build. And they will. The volume of apps coming out is about to spike in a big way.

Creativity isn’t going anywhere, but AI will make experimentation and ideation even faster. Pros and newcomers alike will prototype, solve harder problems with less drama, and work in tight loops where AI tools actually keep up. Building software will become even more of a team sport by combining humans, AI tools, and the systems we teach them to build.