Citizen developers dominate, the rise of AI, code as the new Latin -- development predictions for 2026

Software development, perhaps more than any other area of IT, has seen a major impact from the rise of AI. It’s become easier for anyone to develop apps but that doesn’t come without risks.

Industry experts look ahead to what we can expect to see in the development space, from AI and more, as we head into 2026.

Yair Finzi, CEO and co-founder of Nokod Security, says professional developers will be outnumbered by business users creating their own apps, “By 2026, business-user ‘developers’ will outnumber professional developers 4:1, forcing organizations to extend their governance programs to citizen developer platforms.” He also thinks this will lead to a rise in shadow IT, “The typical enterprises will run an average of 4,500–6,000 AI-generated apps, workflows, and automations in 2026, with 66 percent remaining undiscovered by security and IT teams.”

Brian Madden VP, technology officer and futurist at Citrix, echoes this, “We’ll see more examples of non-developers building automations and mini-apps with AI… a finance analyst wiring up a forecasting workflow, a CSM creating an internal helper bot, a marketer automating parts of campaign reporting. These won’t replace core enterprise systems, and it won’t be “everyone builds their own apps,” but a small slice of employees will quietly become AI-powered tool builders for their teams. The real 2026 story is not that ‘all employees are citizen developers,’ but that every department ends up with a handful of people like this, and they become surprisingly important.”

But Andy Beardshaw, head of development at TXP, thinks citizen coding could be storing up problems for the future, “The growth of low-code and the citizen developers will give rise to the next legacy crisis. While low-code promised to simplify development, many organisations are discovering they can’t maintain what they have built. This will create a new form of technical debt with IT teams left to unravel tools and applications developed by business users without sufficient oversight or long-term planning.”

Scott Gregory, CISO of Sonar, sees AI driving a shift in the developer role:

We're seeing an exponential increase in code volume thanks to AI which has created a complex challenge. The primary threat isn't just a 1:1 increase in flaws; it's a velocity and scale problem. Since humans can no longer manually verify code quality at the speed AI generates it, it has forced a fundamental shift in the developer's role: from being a primary code creator to being a code curator and validator.

The developer's new core skill will be leveraging advanced tooling to validate AI-generated code at scale and knowing precisely where to focus their human attention. As CISOs in 2026, we must work closely with our development teams to help them drive these needed changes, not from an oversight role, but from a technology partner role. We should ask how we can help support building or buying the automation needed to make this change.

Matthias Steiner, senior director of global business innovation at Syntax, sees positives in the democratization of development, “GenAI will permanently close the longstanding gap between the soaring demand for new applications and the limited supply of skilled developers. With AI accelerating software engineering productivity, coding skill alone will no longer define who leads the market.”

However, Brian Nichols, principal in Baker Tilly's risk advisory practice, thinks AI will have a negative impact on developer skills, “AI is quickly becoming the developer’s constant companion. From writing entire functions to patching bugs, AI tools promise faster delivery and cheaper development. But speed often comes at a cost. Many of today’s AI-generated outputs are not built with secure coding practices in mind and over reliance on these tools is ‘dumbing down’ human developers, reducing the critical eye needed to spot flaws before code is deployed.”

Dan Andrew, head of security at Intruder, says AI-generated code will lead to more risks:

In 2026, defenders will see more vulnerabilities introduced by AI-generated code. Vibe coding as a practice will become more widespread. Compounding this threat is the lack of security review processes that can handle the increased volume of code. These processes are overwhelmed by the combined development speed and the additional abstraction inherent in AI-generated code.

However, defenders won’t always be able to identify the source as AI. Most developers will be committing AI-assisted code under their own names, effectively obscuring the origin of the weakness. This lack of traceability makes the problem uniquely challenging.

Chris Royles, field CTO, EMEA at Cloudera, says AI will change the way we see apps, “In 2026, AI will start to radically change the way we think about apps, how they function and how they’re built. Today, apps are declarative, with millions of lines of code coming together to follow fixed rules. But AI is tearing up the rulebook and removing these constraints. With just a few lines of code and a prompt, users will be able to request temporary, purpose-built modules that replace the need for dedicated apps, with AI essentially acting as the operating system and app developer.”

Michael Zuercher, CEO of Prismatic, says, “AI coding agents will push software development into its next phase of maturity. The industry will move beyond writing code line by line to working at a higher level of abstraction, much as it shifted from assembly to modern programming languages. Engineers will spend less time on syntax and more time defining what the software should do rather than how to write it. It marks the beginning of a more mature era of engineering where automation handles the details, and people shape the logic and outcomes. As this shift takes hold, platforms that manage the infrastructure, scale, and operational load behind AI-built software will matter more than ever.”

Code is becoming the new Latin -- historic, but mostly obsolete -- says Tony Gentilcore, co-founder, engineering at Glean, “Natural language has replaced syntax as the interface of creation. In the next 5 years, developers will stop typing functions and start describing intent. Agents will build, test, and validate systems on their own, communicating in their own compressed dialects. Humans will design outcomes, not loops -- and the last person who can actually read the code will sound like a historian.”

Similarly, Tiago Azevedo, CIO at OutSystems, thinks AI agent s will make software obsolete, “Software will fade away as agent-as-a-service delivers outcomes: The agent-as-a-service market is projected to expand from $5.1 billion in 2024 to $47.1 billion by 2030. In 2026, we’ll see more agent subscriptions and services that operate across multiple repositories and databases without discriminating between backend systems and fewer SaaS instances. This means that employees will command groups of AI agents that orchestrate workflows across systems instead of opening multiple tabs to use different software or SaaS platforms. Real, tangible outcomes that drive business forward will be the stars of the show, not the software that gets them there.”

How do you see the developer role evolving? Let us know in the comments.

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