Gergely Orosz · 21 min read · AI & Product
The state of the tech industry in 2026
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A keynote presentation at the LDX3 engineering leadership conference provides a comprehensive snapshot of the tech industry in 2026, drawing on visits to AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic and unpublished data from GitHub, Factory AI, and Linear. The talk covers the unprecedented speed of AI-driven change, what has transformed in software development, what remains broken, and what's coming next. Industry veterans like Martin Fowler confirm that AI's impact surpasses any previous technological shift in magnitude.
Key Takeaways
- The scale and pace of AI's impact on the tech industry is unprecedented, surpassing the internet, mobile, and cloud computing in magnitude according to industry veteran Martin Fowler.
- Writing code by hand has become rare, with engineers commonly working with 5-10 AI agents, and the traditional IDE is fading in relevance.
- AI-driven development has introduced new problems: broken assumptions about code output, theatrical code reviews, and declining quality and reliability.
- Some fundamentals remain unchanged: teams and planning are still critical, and non-engineers are still not shipping code independently.
- Cloud coding agents, new AI infrastructure, and engineers shifting away from reading code directly are emerging trends expected to accelerate.
Excerpt
I recently delivered the keynote at the LDX3 engineering leadership conference in New York, attended by 2,000+ engineering leaders, CTOs, Director+ and Staff+ engineering folks, in which I attempted to create a snapshot of where the tech industry is at this exact point. In the middle of my keynote at LDX3 It came after I had the chance to visit the AI labs OpenAI and Anthropic, meet innovative startups like Ramp, Uber and others, get new, unpublished data from GitHub, Factory AI and Linear. The focus of the talk is trend inside of AI labs, VC-funded startups and Big Tech.…