So far in my review of agentic development over the past year and heading into 2026, I’ve looked at some of the trends shaping LLM services. In this post, I’ll focus on what to expect for AI development tools in the new year. As Cory Doctorow points out in his Reverse Centaur summary, tech companies always want to be “growth stocks” — and for that reason they have to continually prove there is a new vision with untapped potential. This works against teams just improving on existing offerings — heaven forbid the company’s stock is marked as “mature.” But that is really what 2026 should be about: improving on the plethora of new things that developers are trying to get to grips with.

Full report : Five trends in AI development for 2026, including MCP management, parallel running, CLI vs. desktop tools, and challenges with VS Code forks.