How Agentic AI Will Change Programming in 2026

I heard from several sources that the Dec ‘25 update to Claude Code was a game-changer for coding. With some free time, I decided to try it out. The results blew my mind; way more transformational than prior AI tools I’ve used. The hype is right. The game is changing dramatically. I’ve spent a few days pondering the implications and jotted them here.

The summary:

• I expect a quick influx of new features, startups, apps, and innovative ideas to hit the market in ‘26.
• Many of these will encounter functional and security issues. While these can be repaired quickly, there will likely be some short-term hurdles.
• The role of junior developers will change; they will provide more value than ever before. Still, they will need to learn from mistakes to grow.

Let’s start with the upside. I have been thinking about some AI ideas I wanted to explore, but I just haven’t had the time. Life gets busy. I did have a few hours over the New Year break, but kept going down the wrong paths trying to refresh my outdated coding skills. It was frustrating: first, because I wasn’t making progress, and second, because I realized how rusty I am as a programmer! I started fresh with Claude Code, and holy crap… what it accomplished in just an hour was already ahead of my days of work and research. Now, I’d like to give myself some credit for already thinking about the challenges and structure of the work, which helped me guide Claude Code correctly. It even found bugs along the way, and I “discussed” different code options with the agent. Things went very well… until I reached my 5-hour usage limit.

That limit puzzled me, but I thought there might be a better way to use Claude Code. I was micromanaging it; what if I gave up some control and let it work as part of an agentic loop? I would then oversee a higher-level plan and ask the system to handle each small task rather than manage them myself. Once my limit reset, I tried that approach, and whoa, it was truly amazing. In just a few hours, I achieved far more than I expected. This was genuinely transformational for how programmers will work moving forward. Many might become “10x” developers. It was amazing… by setting limits, Claude Code actually forced me to make a fundamental change in my approach to using AI tools.

I found I was engaging the agentic system as a partner. I used the word “we” in the instructions. I was developing a system at a high level that would go off and execute a plan, not just individual steps. I was not worrying as much about the minor details. It was such a radical change for me, and I suspect it will be for others. And that fundamental change is truly different. This. Is. A. New. Game. I’m sorry to write it this way, but it was a sudden realization for me of how quickly the industry will be affected. It was such a pronounced shift in my approach that I felt compelled to write this article and contemplate its changes.

I’ve written papers and given talks about how AI will change software development. I also mentioned that, in the short term, junior developers need to learn from their mistakes to improve. Agents like this could make that problem worse. But I can counter that by saying the nature of entry-level jobs will change. They won’t just be about bug fixes or simple tasks. With supervision, these roles can add value faster than before. Yes, you still need to prove yourself, but you’ll also be more productive.

Honestly, without a solid grasp of the fundamentals, I might not have gone as far as I did. Having been a programmer for years, I found it very helpful to have brought code into production before. But even a less experienced user can develop basic, effective systems. It will be transformative for how people write apps and other functionalities. I’m convinced that, with these tools, people will be able to bring more ideas to life faster than ever before.

While this is huge, transformational, amazing, and all sorts of other superlatives, I mentioned that the agentic system isn’t perfect. I found that once, when making an update, it broke other parts I had asked to develop. I had to prompt it to use memory-safe objects and to consider multi-threading. I don’t see this system replacing programmers or making the fundamentals irrelevant; quite the opposite. The more you know, the better you can work with it. However, given its speed, bugs will happen. And with the amount of code it can produce, it’s nearly impossible for a human to verify everything. We still need static and dynamic security tests, unit tests, and functional tests; the basic SDLC and DevOps practices still apply. We need to think more about automation than ever, which is a tough shift.

In conclusion, tools like Claude Code mark a fundamental change in the role of programmers. They make programming more accessible, democratizing it more than ever. Good things will come from this. But it will also lead to more errors, bugs, and issues, and initially, it might slow down the usability of new systems and ideas. This is a hurdle we’ll get past as we rethink the roles of junior and senior developers, trust in automation, the need for more oversight, and the growing capabilities of agentic systems. It’s going to be a wild ride!

Update (June 2026): Point 1 is already playing out. GitHub’s COO shared data showing the platform went from roughly 1 billion commits in all of 2025 to 275 million per week, about a 14x jump in output volume, with AI agent-initiated pull requests climbing from 4 million last September to over 17 million by March. The influx I expected is here, and the numbers are bigger than I’d have guessed. (summary and figures)