2026 is the year of feeling like you're falling behind

I’m calling it: 2026 is the year of Feeling Like You’re Falling Behind™.

“Who thinks they’re falling behind right now?” I asked on Thursday.

The room was comprised of tech folks: A mix of CTOs, VPs of Engineering, Founding Engineers, and Senior Engineers. They all had prior experience doing AI Engineering, yet every single one of them (including me) put their hand up.

The better question is “What are you going to do about it?”. They were in a room with other folks, getting outside their comfort zone, confronting the challenge head on, by getting hands-on.

Whether or not you’re a dev, there’s 15 minutes you can do on Monday that will move the ball forwards: Get hands-on with something you haven’t tried yet.

If you’re a dev, install Claude Code, or Cursor. If you’re not a dev, install Claude Desktop, then click Cowork.

Yes, it’s different now to 2024/2025, but it’s not that different. If you’re on LinkedIn, you’ve definitely used a “Chatbot” (it answered questions for you).

Now you’re using the same thing, but you’re asking it to take action for you as well. This means it’s called an “Agent”.

That’s it. It’s not as scary as you think. Try it out if you haven’t already. You’ll surprise yourself.

The difficulty of the task has been oversold 👌

If you’re a little ahead of here already, then try out getting one agent to take on a larger piece of work for you, and get it to coordinate a few other agents on your behalf.