What are your predictions for this coming year?
Comments
People's minds will become even lazier due to prolonged daily use of LLMs. They literally won't be able to think for themselves without AI assistance (that's why OpenAI won't fall, btw). Attention spans will drop even lower, causing severe psychological problems. Think 'Digital Dementia 2.0.'
Later, LLMs will be portrayed as something evil, yet everyone will still use them. Parents will use them, while telling their kinds not to do so.
Leetcode is already standard for SWE interviews, but other industries will need to adopt similar tests to verify that an applicant's brain is functioning correctly and that they're capable of doing the job. Maybe a formal confirmation from a psychologist specializing in 'fried brains' will be required.
By johnsmith1840 2025-12-194:436 reply I don't get this take.
My knowledge and engineering has only gone up over time. I read significantly more and higher quality technical information and need to debug problems significantly harder.
I think AI will in general make everyone a lot smarter. Maybe the people who use AI as a companion will melt? I'm sure there's some kind of repetitive addiction loop that could melt your brain just like anythibg else though.
By deepsummer 2025-12-198:004 reply I understand it. For example, with AI you don't need to remember stuff. Like there is a command in MacOS (two actually) to flush the DNS cache. I used to memorize it because I needed it like twice a week. These days, I can't remember it. I just tell Copilot to flush the cache for me. It knows what to do.
And it's like that for many things. Complicated Git commands that I rarely need. I used to remember them at least 50% of the time, and if not, I looked them up. Now I just describe what I need to Copilot. But also APIs that I don't need daily. All that stuff that I used to know is gone, because I don't need to look it up anymore, I just tell Copilot or Claude what to do.
By handoflixue 2025-12-198:461 reply Is that really a bad thing? It's like saying Google Maps makes you lazier, because you don't have to learn navigation. And, heck, why stop there: cars are just insanely lazy! You lose all the exercise benefits of walking.
By danielscrubs 2025-12-199:071 reply Yes? It’s all true. It can be good in one axis and bad in another axis.
By mike_hearn 2025-12-1910:231 reply Why is losing the ability/interest in navigating through a paper map by hand bad, though?
Humanity has adopted and then discarded skills many times in its history. There were once many master archers, nobody outside of one crazy Danish guy has mastered archery for hundreds of years. That isn't bad, nobody cares, nothing of value was lost.
By kingkongjaffa 2025-12-1915:511 reply What we call knowledge work is a bit different to archery though.
Writing for example is proven to be better done by hand with a pen and paper, people who take typed notes don’t retain as much.
AI has accelerated the most simple and obvious answers to easy questions.
For more difficult things deep thinking and writing, partly with pen and paper notes and diagrams are still the most effective tools.
By handoflixue 2025-12-206:40 You can still use pencil and paper for the difficult things. In fact, you'll have more time for doing so, because you don't have to use pencil and paper for the simple things.
By arvid-lind 2025-12-2013:17 > For example, with AI you don't need to remember stuff.
Socrates said the same thing about writing.
By Imustaskforhelp 2025-12-198:50 Hm, perhaps a way to export all your chats from any AI provider you use + sending it back to an LLM to just sum up all the commands that you use in a text file that you can reference?
Like I am starting to use etherpad a lot recently and although I have proton docs and similar, I just love etherpad for creating quick pads for information
Or to be honest, I search it on the internet and ddg's AI feature does give me a short answer (mostly to the point) but I think that there are definitely ways to get our own knowledge base if any outage happens basically.
By johnsmith1840 2025-12-1917:36 lol I also had all sorts of commands memorized for k8s and pandas I don't remember at all. But let's all be honest, was it valuable to constantly lookup how to make a command do what you want?
I wasted so much time on dumbass pandas documentation search when I should have been building. AI is literally the internet all you are doing is querying the internet 2.0.
I often kept vast ugly text documents filled with random commands because I always forgot them.
I can only speak from personal experience. But as a 21 Year old, I'd definitely say that AI has made me so much more unproductive and reduced my attention span immensly. My Brain was already fried from social media and now there is always an "easy" way to do annoying but very educational tasks. And amongst my peers, especially those without a background in IT, misunderstanding and anthropomorphising has made this even worse. I think for people who already have great skills, AI will probably be helpful, not harmful. But for my generation, which has been through covid, social media and now has to figure out healthy AI usage, this is a fight already lost.
By johnsmith1840 2025-12-1917:24 Eh, there's literally always something like this being told and doom and gloomed over. When I was 21 I heard almost the identical statement you said. Covid being the exception.
The only thing that matters is if YOU care. Do you like software? Do you want to learn and make something that was unatainable to you a year ago?
There's also a major difference between college and work so you shouldn't sweat it so much.
It's like saying in the 1970s that people would become dumber because of calculators. It's a tool. You can use it lazily and not learn much, or you use it actively as something that propels you further along in your learning.
no, its not - with calculators, it was up to the person using the tool to figure out which formula to use and which values to plug into the calculator.
The human has to have enough understanding of the problem to know which math to apply and calculate in the first place. That requires understanding and discernment. This works the brain. This mental work strengthens our problem solving ability.
Whereas with AI, you just tell it the problem and it gives an easy answer. Thus involving no further work from the human brain which causes it to atrophy just like any other underused muscle.
By shagmin 2026-01-0116:07 What atrophies with calculator usage is an ability to do long form division for example, or arithmetic operations with large numbers in your head for example.
The way you describe AI - tell it the problem and get an easy answer sounds identical to anecdotal complaints I've heard like Google search providing an answer to everything means no one has to learn anything, or everyone copying code from stack overflow articles. At the end of the day it's still another tool with pros and cons, tradeoffs, etc., and will be used and misused and abused by different people in different ways.
By ggrantrowberry 2025-12-202:59 Nah. It is the same but at a different scale.
You give a calculator a problem and it gives an easy answer thus involving no further work from the human brain which causes it to atrophy just like any other underused muscle.
Just like a calculator can easily solve some problems so can AI. Sure the set of problems it can solve is bigger than a calculator. AI just enables you to work on bigger problems because you’re not spending so much time “calculating by hand”.
If you delegate all your thinking to AI or you use AI when the point of the activity is to do the activity (ie homework at school) then I think you’ll see problems. Just like using a calculator when you’re supposed to be learning how to add will stunt your growth.
By SamaraMichi 2025-12-1923:13 Have you considered that you are a minority who leverages LLMs for your own personal gain? The parent is referring more to the general population who is already doomscrolling away and would LOVE a service that generates prompts for them due to the hassle this represents for them.
By alecco 2025-12-1916:05 Both are right.
The chasm between proactive vs lazy people is growing exponentially. I predict it will bring a lot of drama.
By DANmode 2025-12-1911:16 Not everyone will be made smarter.
Just people like you.
There are other types.
You do know this reads the same as every pessimistic commentary on technology ever, right? So many people were convinced that television was going to fry our brains.
But what was the impact?
Society has made tremendous progress since the invention of TV.
By eucryphia 2025-12-190:47 I regret watching too much television as a kid. Fortunately my mother wouldn’t allow us to play indoors on the weekends unless it was raining.
By serf 2025-12-190:42 ... do you know it didn't?
I'm not sure myself.
I do know that television feels about as deep as a puddle for me. Literature a bit less so. I suspect there is something to this.
By nearlyepic 2025-12-196:16 ...you're saying that 24/7 news channels didn't do that?
By coffeecoders 2025-12-1823:034 reply My prediction: 2026 looks normal.
AI stays the top story but in a boring way as novelty wears off and models get cheaper and faster (maybe even more embedded). No AGI moment. LLMs start feeling like databases or cloud compute.
No SpaceX or OpenAI IPO moment. Capital markets quietly reward the boring winners instead. S&P 500 grinds out another double digit year, mostly because earnings keep up and alternatives still look worse. Tech discourse stays apocalyptic, but balance sheets don't.
If you mute politics and social media noise, 2026 probably looks like one of those years that we later remember as "stable" in retrospect.
Bonus: Bitcoin sees both 50k and 150k.
By hamburgererror 2025-12-1912:14 > If you mute politics and social media noise, 2026 probably looks like one of those years that we later remember as "stable" in retrospect.
I love this, we focus way too much on the apparent chaos of daily life. Any news seems like a big wave that announces something bigger and we spend our time (especially here!) imagining the tsunami to come. Then later, we realize that most events are just unimportant to the point we forgot about them.
By yellowcake0 2025-12-196:34 I'm not sure OpenAI can realistically afford not to IPO given its spending commitments.
By johnwheeler 2025-12-190:141 reply To me, this is wishful thinking. The more I see these "our jobs are safe" claims, the more I fear our jobs are not safe, and people are just trying to convince themselves which is an indicator of turmoil ahead.
By johnwheeler 2025-12-1918:221 reply Tech folk. Anyone really.
By OGEnthusiast 2025-12-1919:242 reply What does "safe" mean? Unemployment in the US right now is under 5% which is historically very good (even though it's been slightly trending upwards over the past few months).
By satvikpendem 2025-12-2116:28 Keep in mind this is supporting the gif economy too. Lots of people are underemployed not necessarily unemployed because they start driving Uber for example instead of just wanting to sit at home after a job loss.
By johnwheeler 2025-12-1921:131 reply Employed. My contention is the AI is getting so good at doing tech related things that you'll need far fewer employees. I think Claude Code 4.5 is already there. Honestly, it just needs to permeate the market.
By OGEnthusiast 2025-12-1921:461 reply I agree that Claude Code is a lot more effective than I was expecting, but I don't think it can fully replace human software engineers, nor do I think it's on any trajectory to do so. It does make senior engineers a lot more productive so I could see it reducing some demand for new grad software engineers.
By DANmode 2025-12-239:47 How many years will it need to study completed projects by senior engineers?
By jondwillis 2025-12-195:272 reply So, 2025 again, gotcha.
Previous Years:
- 2025: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42490343
- 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38777115
- 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34125628
- 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29746236
- 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25594068
- 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21802596
- 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18753859
- 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16007988
- 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10809767
- 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822723
- 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6994370
- 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3395201
- 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1970023
Read the 2025 prediction thread for some perspective.
(Hope you didn't stake your retirement on bitcoin hitting $200,000!)
By Imustaskforhelp 2025-12-198:54 >>> There are even more restrictions aimed at stopping kids using social media. Restrictions on phone use in schools, who can sign up for social media, etc..
Additionally, that it'll eventually prove to be a wild success, with significant benefit to kids.
On the darker side, the same technologies and restrictions will be applied in various ways to adults (similar to the porn verification laws), which will have significantly more negative effects.
(source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42490517)
There are some correct predictions it seems, a lot of this is happening around the world so it would be interesting to see how this pans out in 2026, thoughts?
By nrhrjrjrjtntbt 2025-12-187:511 reply > There are even more restrictions aimed at stopping kids using social media.
I dont recall if the Australia ban was on the cards then.
By yen223 2025-12-192:03 The act passed federal parliament late 2024. It already existed in the state of South Australia before that.
