- EVs will be in the Early Majority group, and 2/3 of them will be Chinese. At least 1 in 4 of new cars purchased will be EVs.

- AI will innovate towards visuals, personality, and tool use. AI tool use will start to innovate past just reading docs, maybe into more things like gaming and robotics.

- Some AI products (not necessarily LLMs) will start competing on latency. Notably on voice/calls, but also things like drones, robotics, etc.

- Major disruptions on the financial markets due to the USD losing value. Commodities go up. Not certain about Bitcoin/Crypto as it is backed mostly by the USD itself.

- US goes on the offensive on tokenization moving bonds, stocks, transfers, etc. to the blockchain. China opens up its eCNY to the grand public.

- AI bubble pops. Companies decide that LLM-coding is not worth it after accounting for the downsides. LLMs for generating photos and videos are still not good enough. OpenAI goes the way of pipedpiper.

- The war in Ukraine remains unresolved. Russia advances but only marginally. Europe still shaking its head about what to do. US lower its involvement.

- The US world cup goes very badly. Like embarrassingly bad. Goes okay in Canada and kinda okay in Mexico though.

- China invades Taiwan in the last month of 2026.

Physical AI will make subversive discoveries that exceed everyone's expectations - space-time integrated computing, rather than the current three-dimensional spatial computing plus discrete time steps

YouTube will be so inundated by AI cat and dog videos that people stop watching them altogether. People will automatically assume anything labeled "cute" is fake.

I finally get adopted by a nice family of sentient pizzas in 2026.

https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html

Some people will write 2025 on forms asking for the current year.

No predictions, only wish next year bad things no so much. And f** u 2025.

In the software engineering world, in 2026 we saw a wave of code assistant products. In 2026, we will see a wave of designing software architecture products, not just on greenfield projects but also brownfield projects.

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

- 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025681

- 2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=416530

Last year I predicted: People will continue to run websites, and need to know when they're down (god, I hope).

My 2026 prediction is that people will continue running websites and buiding web apps that need monitoring, more than ever before.

I don't know but All I know is AI has taken over the world. Nowadays AI is being used everywhere.

Musk empire will come crashing down, starting with Tesla.

AI bubble will start to pop (even though the adoption continues to improve slowly).

US / Europe separation will accelerate.

EDIT: For the first 2 - it's the 3rd year I'm thinking it will be 'the' year...

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Still no high-speed rail in the US

I predict more layoffs as I unfortunately already did in 2024 [0].

But let's just say you have to prepare for 2030. The future of jobs report 2025 by the WEF is also reporting that 40% of employers are planning to reduce their workforce because of AI by 2030. [1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42490692

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43041311

The USD will devalue 5-10% further.

Flock and other government tools for watching and controlling you will expand.

Big companies will expand their regulatory capture, especially in medical care. Fingers will continue to be pointed at health insurance as the problem while the real problem of an artificially limited supply of doctors goes unaddressed.

Government agencies will continue their slow bloat as no mechanism exists for government like bankruptcy in the private sector.

Patent trolls will expand their lawsuits and extort more legitimate businesses.

The far left will assassinate more Republican leaders.

AI bots post enough content fast enough that the general public learns about the "dead internet" theory.

The Supreme Court rules against Trump in several important cases (tariffs and birthright citizenship, and a couple of others).

Trump threatens to arrest at least one big tech executive.

LLMs continue to improve, but the rate becomes slow enough that most people realize that AGI is not just around the corner.

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