Ask HN: What are your predictions for 2026?

what he said, but literally the exact opposite of every prediction for me.

I wrote a lot. Let me add a tldr:

any international trades happening in non-US dollar is an "acceleration" of dedollarizatiom, given that currently all trade is dollarized.

Original:

I don't known if I understand the spirit of the question. There are no metrics or tracking of how "dollarized" the international economy is because virtually all trade is done in dollars and there has been no risk of this changing for the past ?65? years

My original prediction for 2026 (not 2025, mind you) made in 2024 was based on a few factors, if I recall correctly, 1) the Russia-Ucraine war and related sanctions; 2) the open discussion in BRICS about trade in direct currencies; and 3) the then-promised isolatonist policies of Trump's second mandate.

What we've seen in 2025 makes all of those stronger I guess.

1) I don't know the status of the Russia-Ucraine war; all I know is it is a glaring sign of the end of Pax Americana (as is the Israel-Palestine genocide/war, by the way, which the US would -not- have allowed given the strong internal opposition and negative popularity among the American public). So sanctions of Russia notwistanding, that status quo, which strongly related to dollar as reserve currency, is either agonizing or dead.

2) Trump and the US attempted a very strong response to the (first ever?) trades in local currency between Brazil and China, mostly in the form of targeted tariffs (all discourse about Bolsonaro and whatever being the motivation for tariffing Brazilian imports being, in my opinion, political smoke and mirrors). I don't think it worked. I think BRICS might press on this. If the mercosur/EU trade deal goes through it will also be a strong force towards trade in Euros/Reais/Pesos directly I believe.

3) I don't think I need to clarify; tariffs and other issues brought on by the current US government were severely negative to the placement of the US as a preferred trade partner. This is to beyond economic choice; active anti-american sentiment are at all times high in countries like Canada, Denmark, and Mexico, all historically aligned with the US. This may not seem that relevant but come election cycles in those and other countries we might see platforms/candidates that openly propose to "secede" from the US hegemony international order. If that happens, removing US military bases is a first go. Alternatives to the US "petrodollar" a close second.

Let me explain again why I said "disruptive" rather than "substantial"：the current "embodied artificial intelligence" still uses 19th-century numerical methods (the Adams-Bashforth integration method from 1883 and the Runge method from 1895) to represent time frames + three-dimensional space calculations to approximate four-dimensional spacetime (relativistic covariance has proven that spacetime is an integrated whole, i.e., four-dimensional spacetime). I will release more specific code later - you might wonder, don't the "scientists" at those big companies know about this? The answer is that they do know, and I will also release the reasons later, which will definitely surprise you!

This is less of a prediction, more of how I see this industry progressing.

I really feel "web dev" is going to get highly commoditized by GenAI, by web dev I mean 99% of building CRUD-adjacent apps, we are already seeing it now with tools like Claude Code etc, this pipeline is just going to get more refined, with tigther testing feedback loops, PR-workflows and a CI/CD deployment pipeline which the GenAI will control. This might be amplified by the fact the sheer amount of tested, high quality there is in the JavaScript-ecosystem for the AI to train on and learn from.

Software engineering in general will tend more systems and embedded software, fields where GenAI can't perform well or can't be trusted to produce good code (I am thinking writing device drivers, or maintainence of legacy C applications) as well as deep research fields. The average software engineering job might be either that of a "technical product manager", or "researcher" or "low-level systems expert"

That's just what I feel. Honestly, I am probably much younger an others on this forum, so I haven't really seen this industry "evolve" this is just how it looks to me now. I believe there was a time in the early 2010s where there was a boom of this "generalist developer" where if you knew your JavaScript-ecosystem (or App Dev ecosystem for that matter) pretty well, you could land a pretty decent job right out of college, or without a college degree at all.

To me, at this stage the world in general needs software engineers who understand the "world" if that makes sense (in terms of physics, mathematics), or who have a really good mental model of computation. Better put, software engineering will become a tool in the larger context of research & development of tech that advance humanity.