I hear a lot lately that 2026 is the year where the IDE dies. LLMs will be so good that they will generate all the code by themselves and developers will become a mix of product managers, architects and code reviewers.
Creating code has never been a goal by itself. The features that the code creates, solving problems for those using our software, that's the goal of every (valuable) line of code.
Opus 4.5 is an impressive LLM the quality of its code and its planning capabilities are astonishing. Cursor's composer and GPT codex are also very good. Based on the evolution of the last 6 months we'll have very capable LLMs in no time.
But that approach still leaves us with a big unsolved problem. It's us that still need to provide all business decisions for the LLM.
The real revolution, the big shift in how we develop software will come the day we can talk to LLMs about our business.
It is only when the LLMs understand our business that they can start asking the right questions when we ask for a new feature or a bug fix.
I can see this as a big change of paradigm same as with the autonomous car. The real change in autonomous cars is not that they can drive unattended. The change is that because they can drive unattended, I don't need to buy a car anymore, I will use an app to request one when I need it and it will take me to my destination and then leave to serve another person. That completely reshapes the automotive industry.
It's the same with LLMs. Context engineering, the current tools… they are focused on the code and we should focus on the problems that we are trying to solve with that code.
That's when the big shift will come.
