Daniel Roe
TypeScript has won.
Not as a bundler – but as a language. Deno and Bun (have) supported it for a long time. And now, type stripping means you can write it natively in stable Node.js versions. If types as comments makes it, you'll even be able to write in the browser.
…and the day of Vite has come. This year, we saw Vite downloads surpass webpack's. And alongside it, Vitest usage has surged upwards. It seems like a good time to opt in to the new Vite toolchain, and 2026 promises to be the year that happens – with the stable release of Rolldown to power a new, faster Vite, as well as the promise of an all-in-one 'Vite+'.
Our tools are better than ever. Yet the existential question we are all asking is quite different: what about AI?
AI is poised to change how we consume documentation, write code, make architectural choices, and more. Companies are betting everything on new patterns of development. For the vast majority of us, coding agents are changing how we interface with our code.
Is that a good thing?
Apparently by the end of 2025, just under 30% of code was AI-generated. Cursor and Zed are surging in popularity, even if they are far from dethroning VSCode as the most-used IDE. And agent-based approaches, like Claude, Gemini and Copilot are growing quickly.
For those of us who are developers, knowing what 'good' looks like will be more important than ever, whatever tools we use. Keeping on top of new language features will be more important. As will knowing what libraries to build on, rather than vibe coding everything from scratch.
It's already possible to spin up a new project in a day – or migrate an existing project easily. That's a challenge for framework and library authors. We need to make sure our tools continue to serve developers. We can't count on inertia.
And that's a reason for all users to be optimistic.
Let's see what 2026 brings. I'm hoping it will be faster tools, better developer experience, and the power of technology acting as a force multiplier to augment our own agency and choices.