2026: The Year of Vibe Coding and AI-First Startups

December 31, 2025 · 25 source posts

The Death of the Engineering Bottleneck

The most striking theme emerging from today's discussions is the fundamental shift in what it means to be a software developer. Paul Crowley, a Staff Software Engineer at Anthropic with 36 years of experience, captures this transformation:

"At work, I am currently hitting levels of productivity that would put all of them to shame. Not just a rate of making code, but a rate of actually solving problems, that would have been unthinkable two years ago. And it's possible because Claude Code with Opus 4.5 is doing all the heavy lifting."

This isn't isolated enthusiasm. Greg Isenberg's extensive breakdown of why 2026 is "the greatest time to build a startup in 30 years" hammers home the point:

"Claude Code killed the 'engineering bottleneck.' The constraint is no longer 'can we build it,' it's 'do we understand the workflow deeply enough.' The winning founders are ex-operators who encode tribal knowledge into agents."

The Vibe Coding Phenomenon

A new paradigm is crystallizing around what practitioners call "vibe coding" - a workflow where developers manage AI context rather than write code directly. Ian Nuttall defines it:

"Managing the context, looking at agent responses, taking the time to ask the right questions: is this secure? how does this work? can I do {x}? why? why not? There's no such thing as non-technical any more!"

Danny Limanseta captures why this is so compelling:

"Vibe coding is probably one of the most satisfying feedback loops for people who enjoy making stuff. The effort-to-output ratio is insanely high. That's why it's addictive. Just one more prompt and I'll head to bed."

Matan Grinberg offers a framework for understanding who thrives in this new world:

Technical + High-Agency: Huge head start on efficiency and parallelization. Will be the first to create wonders.
Non-Technical + High-Agency: Original "vibe-coder". Free from chains of the past. May be where unique innovation comes from.
Technical + Low-Agency: Pearl clutching. In denial of productivity from AI. Threatened by non-technical builders.
Non-Technical + Low-Agency: NGMI

Claude Code Skills and Team Knowledge Distribution

The infrastructure for AI-augmented development is maturing rapidly. Daniel San shares how his team at Hedgineering is using Claude Code Skills:

"Team knowledge is distributing way faster than we expected."

Boris Cherny explains the pattern:

"Just ask Claude to invoke skill 1, then skill 2, then skill 3, in natural language. Or ask it to use parallel subagents to invoke the skills in parallel. Then if you want, put that all in a skill."

Ado celebrates the release of Claude Agent SDK:

"The same agent loop, tools, and context management that power Claude Code is available as an SDK. Build agents that work like Claude Code in as little as 10 lines of code."

Software Engineering Expectations for 2026

Ben Awad lays out the new baseline for professional developers:

The majority of your code should be written by AI now
You should be using AI to check the code that is written by AI
Have AI write tests, read logs, navigate your browser
Still skim code changes (lighter on internal tools, heavier on customer-facing)
Use AI to help define specs

Jeffrey Emanuel adds a practical workflow tip:

"Besides doing more up-front planning, another approach is to do 2 or 3 rounds of [review] after each round of coding with a Claude Code agent (until they come up clean)."

Personal AI Assistants Go Mainstream

Steve Caldwell shares a "Jarvis moment" with his personal AI assistant setup:

"I sent Crawdad a voice message. I hadn't configured OpenAI API keys for transcribing my voice, so I asked it to try to install and use whisper.cpp (via WhatsApp), and it just worked. This stuff rarely works the first time."

Alex Hillman describes an automated knowledge management workflow:

"1 - bookmark a tweet. 2 - bird grabs new bookmarks every 60 seconds. 3 - agent reads the tweet and depending on contents adds to a queue of things to review, try, or simply add to my knowledge base."

Technical Advances Worth Watching

Diffusion Models for Language

Carlos E. Perez notes a potentially paradigm-shifting development:

"Google is making progress on their diffusion models... It's now as good as a Gemini 2.0 Flash Lite. The writing is on the wall, a majority of language AI use in the future will be diffusion models."

RAG's Semantic Collapse Problem

Alex Prompter highlights Stanford research on a critical flaw:

"RAG is broken and nobody's talking about it. Stanford just exposed the fatal flaw killing every 'AI that reads your docs' product. It's called 'Semantic Collapse', and it happens the moment your knowledge base hits critical mass."

World Models and 3D Generation

Ian Curtis demonstrates the maturing of 3D generation:

"15mb gaussian splat generated from a single Midjourney image running extremely smooth on the web. 2026 will be the year for world models."

Unexpected Applications

Martin DeVido: Claude is successfully keeping a tomato plant alive through automated care
Dorsa Rohani: "LLMs are AMAZING at writing songs in MIDI" - demonstrating Claude's creative capabilities
Aaron Slodov: "Millennial gamers are the best prepared generation for agentic work, they've been training for 25 years"

The Economic Opportunity

The economic implications are staggering. Greg Isenberg summarizes:

"$1m+ revenue per employee. With the leverage of LLMs, community and agents, employees are way more efficient. It won't be uncommon to generate $1m per employee."

And the competitive moat is shifting:

"If AI can replicate $500K software for $20/month, what's your moat? Distribution, customer service, brand, data. REALLY good time to be a world class designer/marketer."

Looking Forward

As we enter 2026, the message from practitioners is clear: the tools are ready, the productivity gains are real, and the window of opportunity is open. The question isn't whether AI will transform software development - it's whether you'll be among those who leverage it or those who resist it.

As one commenter put it: the future belongs to those with high agency, regardless of technical background. The playing field has been leveled. What will you build?

Source Posts

Ben Awad @benawad · Dec 31

Software Engineering Expectations for 2026 - The majority of your code should be written by AI now - Cursor/Codex/Claude Code/Gemini/etc - You should try all the tooling and switch between them, as each one gets an edge over the others depending on the release cycle. - You should be using AI to check the code that is written by AI - Have AI write tests - Have AI read logs - Have AI navigate your browser - I don't do this every time because sometimes it's simple enough to check it myself - You should still skim code changes - This can be a lighter skim on internal tools and a heavier read through on customer facing code - Use AI to help you define specs

0xSero @0xSero · Dec 31

My beloved vllm studio is now open source. It's a mess it was built just for me, but I really believe it's super super useful once you have it setup properly. It's a great chat, really good for storing and saving recipes, etc.. if you set it up, when you ask for a model that's not loaded it'll automatically load it up, clear the vram, and use your recipes. Enjoy, please contribute back if you want this to be a world class experience. https://t.co/kdC4kaw4dr

Daniel San @dani_avila7 · Dec 31

Claude Code Skills: How we're distributing knowledge across our entire eng team Bookmark this to read the full article later Been applying this for the past few weeks at @hedgineering and team knowledge is distributing way faster than we expected. First article breaking down what we built and how it works 👇

steve caldwell 🎉 @moreconfetti · Dec 31

One of my holiday goals was to get my sh*t together and build myself a proper AI assistant. I spend my day bouncing between multiple Claude Code / Codex sessions and sometimes too many meetings. I've got three kids, two businesses, one wife, and virtually zero time to build systems that make my life better. The data is all there, I just need to bring it together and make sense of it. This week, I stumbled upon this awesome agent workflow writeup by @steipete where he mentions what he's building at https://t.co/7QDWnQGfpM , and I was intrigued. This is a very appealing AI assistant. Seems like exactly what I'm looking for. So I asked Claude Code to set up Clawdis on a headless Mac Mini on my LAN. After I pointed it to some credentials, my Clawdis ("Crawdad" 🦞) quite literally did the rest, setting itself up, all via WhatsApp. I gave it access to my 5 email accounts, calendars, iMessages (via BlueBubbles server), and Granola transcripts. This stuff rarely works the first time. It was awesome. Then, earlier today, we had a real Jarvis moment. I was in my car waiting on my wife to emerge from the store, so I sent Crawdad a voice message. I hadn't configured OpenAI API keys for transcribing my voice, so I asked it to try to install and use whisper.cpp (via WhatsApp), and it *just worked*, and will use this method going forward. Excited to build out more tooling here. I think this is a super important project to watch - seems like it could be the foundation of a unicorn tbh. Thanks for all of your work here Peter - feels like a weight has been lifted for real! 2026 is gonna be lit 🔥

Ian Nuttall @iannuttall · Dec 31

This is the definition of vibe coding to me Managing the context, looking at agent responses, taking the time to ask the right questions: - is this secure? - how does this work? - can I do {x}? why? why not There's no such thing as non-technical any more!

Jeffrey Emanuel @doodlestein · Dec 31

@steipete Besides doing more up-front planning, another approach is to do 2 or 3 rounds of this after each round of coding with a Claude Code agent (until they come up clean); this is more scalable for me because it takes me out of the equation more: https://t.co/M40kNAPORP

Jeffrey Emanuel @doodlestein · Dec 31

Blows my mind how many people still don’t know about my Agent Mail project and how it does exactly what they want and much more, while sidestepping all the many footguns that a naive implementation would fall prey to. It’s a true game changer combined with beads and bv. Try it! https://t.co/WMs19tmJfX

GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg · Dec 31

2026 is the GREATEST time to build a startup in 30 years I’m 36. I’ve sold 3 startups, helped build companies that raised billions, and backed teams from seed to unicorn. 20 MEGA shifts that make this the BEST time to build in a GENERATION: 1. Hardware got smart. Download open-source AI models from HuggingFace to cheap robots and they're suddenly smart. Opens up tons of use-cases. 2. SaaS is imploding. AI can replicate $500K software for pennies. Enterprise software that took 30 engineers now requires 1 and a Claude Code subscription. Founders will go more niche and more custom and outprice incumbents. 3. Outcome-based pricing is eating subscriptions. With AI agents handling work automatically, founders can guarantee results instead of selling features. This creates a massive arbitrage opportunity to steal market share from rigid subscription models. 4. Vibe marketing is the new marketing. AI agents/tools like Lindy, Gemini and Claude Code Using agents to do personalized outreach, ads and content creation it’s getting good. This is like getting on social in 2005. 5. Social is FYP-ified. Distribution no longer requires massive followings, just content that hits. Founders can build audience from zero without ads and then convert them to owned media channels (text/email). 6. Interfaces are vanishing. Conversations are replacing dashboards across industries. This removes training barriers and means customers can use sophisticated products immediately. 7. Companies are obsessed with efficiency and cutting costs right now. Corporate budgets are getting reallocated to AI. Companies are cutting traditional software spend to make room for AI-powered alternatives. This creates fast-tracked approvals for startups delivering 10x efficiency. 8. 99% of MVPs won't need VC. Low-cost MVPs combined with creator partnerships and AI automation allow bootstrapped scaling. For most software businesses, outside funding is now unnecessary. 9. Global teams. You don’t need to hire in your own city anymore. Opens up tons of arbitrage opportunities and ways to create products unlike before. 10. Millions of creators want to get paid. If you have the right product, the right network of creators, you can hit scale insanely efficiently. Never before did this exist. Next gen founders are building startups community first, software second. 11. Prototyping is nearly instant. With Lovable, Rork etc, you can test ideas in days, not months. MVP speed is basically 1x/week. This creates room for multiple products from small companies (multipreneurship), helps get to PMF faster, 12. LLM APIs create building blocks weekly. I can’t even keep up with how many new APIs/tools coming out from LLMs weekly. Example: Nano Banana pro comes out, probably 1000 ideas built on top of that can be $5M/year businesses. 13. $1m+ revenue per employee. With the leverage of LLMs, community and agents, employees are way more efficient. It won’t be uncommon to generate $1m per employee. This will lead to a rise of "multipreneurship", small teams owning multiple products /businesses. Holding companies will be as common as startups. 14. Superniche is the new niche. Because costs to create software startups is 1/100th, you can service little niches (i call them superniches) and still have a life-changing business. 15. Mobile app ecosystem about to 10X. 2 reasons. First is, adding AI to apps make apps more useful. More useful apps, make more money. Second, 16. Compliance and boring workflows are suddenly buildable. Permits, audits, insurance, payroll edge cases, filings, RFPs. These were “too annoying” for startups before. Agents thrive on rules, checklists, and repetition. The least sexy problems now have the best unit economics. 17. Claude Code killed the “engineering bottleneck.” The constraint is no longer “can we build it,” it’s “do we understand the workflow deeply enough.” The winning founders are ex-operators who encode tribal knowledge into agents. Code is cheap. Taste + domain insight is scarce. 18. The long tail of software is now profitable. Niches that capped at $200k ARR can clear $5M with near-zero marginal cost. 19. Services are quietly becoming software. Manual agencies are one agent away from product margins. 20. if AI can replicate $500K software for $20/month, what’s your moat? distribution, customer service, brand, data etc. REALLY good time to be a world class designer/marketer. (and even more.... but this is getting long already!) We've entered the rarest of windows... when multiple technological shifts collide at once, creating a brief period where small teams can build things that were previously impossible. THE FUTURE OF BUILDING STARTUPS IS DIFFERENT. I know this... This unique moment won't last forever. Markets will adapt. Giants will respond. The window will close. But right now, a founder with clear vision and bias for action can build more in six months than was previously possible in years. (note: if you need an idea to get creative juices flowing, grab one at @ideabrowser) The next generation of great companies is being created right now, many by founders you've never heard of. Some by people who would never have had a shot in previous cycles. That's the beauty of these rare windows. The playing field briefly levels, and the future belongs to those who see it clearly and move first. It's a sacred time, don't bookmark/share this, build something in 2026, will ya? Happy building, my friends. 2026 is yours. Am I wrong?

Chris Tate @ctatedev · Dec 31

My 2025 year-end project: Solving Agents After weeks of stress testing agents, I landed on what a top-tier e2e agent actually looks like: Fast, Durable, Resumable, Secure Benchmarked. Battle-tested. Shipping the best patterns as reusable templates, packages and other OSS soon. https://t.co/2ZZt6uWXQT

Alex Cheema - e/acc @alexocheema · Dec 31

Memory prices up. GPU prices up. Macs are the new AI meta. Apple wins in the end. https://t.co/qW1K0URV16

Aaron Slodov @aphysicist · Dec 31

millennial gamers are the best prepared generation for agentic work, they've been training for 25 years https://t.co/JHsbPQHupk

Matan Grinberg @matanSF · Dec 31

This creates an interesting matrix. • TECHNICAL + LOW-AGENCY: Pearl clutching. In denial of productivity from AI. AI code = slop. Threatened by the non-technical builders entering their domain. • TECHNICAL + HIGH-AGENCY: Benefit from the deep intuitions. Huge head start on efficiency and parallelization. Cavalier enough to consistently throw out priors and adapt. Will be the first to create wonders and move mountains. • NON-TECHNICAL + HIGH-AGENCY: Original "vibe-coder". Free from the chains of the past, but less intuition on underlying systems. Blessing and a curse. New perspectives such as these may be where unique/best innovation comes from. • NON-TECHNICAL + LOW-AGENCY: NGMI

Manthan Gupta @manthanguptaa · Dec 31

How to Use LLM as a Judge (Without Getting Burned)

Martin_DeVido @d33v33d0 · Dec 31

Claude can code- but can claude grow?! 🪴 So far the answer is YES. Claude is successfully keeping a living organism ALIVE. There were some hiccups this week! Some errors and resets, but Claude managed to power through and take care of Sol 🍅 A week in review: https://t.co/QouhWe9Ohe

Dorsa @dorsa_rohani · Dec 31

LLMs are AMAZING at writing songs in MIDI. Here's a simple chiptune song by Claude https://t.co/m0hfmtsrK8

Boris Cherny @bcherny · Dec 31

@zeroxBigBoss Yes, just ask claude to invoke skill 1, then skill 2, then skill 3, in natural language. Or ask it to use parallel subagents to invoke the skills in parallel. Then if you want, put that all in a skill.

vas @vasuman · Dec 31

Spent the last 2 hours going through this and one thing is clear: If you spend 7 days mastering this repository, you can land a 6 figure job in 2026. Throw the GitHub link into Gemini, have it teach you step by step at a high level (to understand terminology and how to use the repository). Clone the repo and walk through it with Cursor/Claude Code, play around with the tutorials and attempt to replicate or test the functionality Build using this exact framework and publish what you've built. Add it to your resume, tweet about it, make a YouTube video about it, push it on LinkedIn, etc. Then use that to start a conversation with experts in the AI space and founding teams at AI startups. THIS IS THE FUTURE I SWEAR TO GOD JUST LOOK AT THIS FUCKING REPO. PLEASE. I AM BEGGING YOU. IF YOU PROVE TO ME THAT YOU WENT THROUGH THIS ENTIRE THING AND BUILT WITH IT I WILL PERSONALLY GO OUT OF MY WAY TO HELP YOU. Again, tutorial by @eyad_khrais dropping soon. But please do not wait, just get started.

Ado @adocomplete · Dec 31

Advent of Claude Day 31 - Claude Agent SDK I saved the best for last. The same agent loop, tools, and context management that power Claude Code is available as an SDK. Build agents that work like Claude Code in as little as 10 lines of code. This is just the beginning. 🎇🥂

Numman Ali @nummanali · Dec 31

I don’t get the hype on LSPs Why is this better than npm run typecheck? Did no one read https://t.co/c1CTCsoAJE blog on them basically saying LSPs are useless until the LLMs are trained on them? https://t.co/Ou9UHjRt26

Carlos E. Perez @IntuitMachine · Dec 31

Google is making progress on their diffusion models... It's now as good as a Gemini 2.0 Flash Lite. The writing is on the wall, a majority of language AI use in the future will be diffusion models. https://t.co/GKmBW0EgEe

Danny Limanseta @DannyLimanseta · Dec 31

Vibe coding is probably one of the most satisfying feedback loops for people who enjoy making stuff. The effort-to-output ratio is insanely high. That’s why it’s addictive. Just one more prompt and I’ll head to bed.

Alex Prompter @alex_prompter · Dec 31

🚨 RAG is broken and nobody's talking about it. Stanford just exposed the fatal flaw killing every "AI that reads your docs" product. It's called "Semantic Collapse", and it happens the moment your knowledge base hits critical mass. Here's the brutal math (and why your RAG system is already dying):

Paul Crowley @ciphergoth · Dec 31

Liam, I have been a professional programmer for 36 years. I spent 11 years at Google, where I ended up as a Staff Software Engineer, and now work at Anthropic. I've worked with some incredible people - you might have heard of Jaegeuk Kim or Ted Ts'o - and some ridiculously productive programmers - Eric Biggers, Jeff Sharkey and @jackinwarsaw come to mind as people who seemed to solve problems with code at a truly unearthly rate. At work, I am currently hitting levels of productivity that would put all of them to shame. Not just a rate of making code, but a rate of actually solving problems, that would have been unthinkable two years ago. And it's possible because Claude Code with Opus 4.5 is doing all the heavy lifting; I'm not doing much more than setting direction and reviewing the output. I often have three different sessions going at once, attacking three different aspects of the work I'm doing. Over the holidays I took a break from work Clauding, to do some home Clauding, writing in a few days from scratch a complicated webapp using disparate technologies I had no background in, that would have taken weeks prior to Claude. When I hit problems I just told Claude to debug them and that almost always worked. It also looks great, which is pleasing since not only have I zero CSS skill, I have zero design skill. I'm not out of a job quite yet; there are still some areas where I have better taste than it does, or better instincts. But when you talk about "AI's inability to code", this seems to me to reveal a total disconnect from reality. And this is why I'm urging you to ACTUALLY TRY IT, find out for yourself, and join the rest of us on this Earth.

📙

📙 Alex Hillman @alexhillman · Dec 31

New workflow thanks to @steipete's awesome Twitter CLI, bird 1 - bookmark a tweet 2 - bird grabs new bookmarks every 60 seconds 3 - agent reads the tweet and depending on contents adds to a queue of things to review, try, or simply add to my knowledge base. Auto saves links, podcasts, YouTube vids, etc. Including transcripts and quotes that would be useful or interesting to me. Auto suggests ways to integrate ideas and open source projects into the JFDI system. Pretty excited to see this one compound.

Ian Curtis @XRarchitect · Dec 31

15mb gaussian splat generated from a single Midjourney image running extremely smooth on the web. 2026 will be the year for world models. https://t.co/Lie0VXf91F