The unhinged world of tech in 2026...

The year is 2026. Your $3,500 smart

fridge has a GPU and displays

advertisements. Your boss is an AI. Your

girlfriend is a robot. And every startup

pitch sounds like Uber, but quantum.

Welcome to the future. It's somehow both

overengineered and still in beta. But

it's time for the annual tradition where

I wake up the vat of precogs in my

garage and tell you exactly what's going

to happen this year. Last year, I told

you AI agents would be the biggest thing

in tech. And if you would have just

listened to me, you'd be a billionaire

right now. But you didn't listen. In

fact, I didn't even listen to myself,

and now it's too late to frontr run this

trend. But all is not lost. There are

some even bigger trends emerging in

Silicon Valley right now. And as long as

the record-breaking stock market doesn't

crash, there's an endless supply of

money being thrown around that can still

make us all billionaires. In today's

video, we'll look at 10 trends in

technology, covering everything from AI

slop to nuclearpowered quantum sex

robots to new JavaScript framework

features that will finally make the

world a better place. It is January

14th, 2026, and you're watching the Code

Report. Not everybody is cut out to

become a billionaire AI grifter, but the

next best thing is landing a stable,

high-paying job doing some honest

software engineering work. But will

those jobs even exist in 2026?

Unfortunately, the good old days of 2023

don't seem like they're coming back

after the 2023 tech pullback and the

rise of AI coding tools that followed.

The amount of job openings on Indeed for

software engineers have not regained

their original glory. But this ominous

looking chart doesn't tell the full

story. On a more positive note, the

Bureau of Labor Statistics is still

forecasting 15% software development job

growth through 2034. In addition, back

in September, a major change to the H1B

program might be good news or bad news

depending on who you are. If you weren't

lucky enough to be born in the United

States, you'll now have a $100,000 fee

to apply for an H-1B visa. And that

makes it far more difficult for US-based

tech companies to hire cheap labor from

overseas. The good news though is that

despite what the optimist will tell you,

AI coding tools are still nowhere close

to replacing human engineers. And I have

zero fears that that's going to change

in 2026. In fact, all the vibe coded

slop out there is creating a whole new

class of jobs called code janitors who

need to clean up all the garbage code

created by these AI tools. But where is

AI itself headed? Everybody knows we're

in a bubble with valuations that make

zero sense. But the question is, are we

at the peak of this bubble, or are we

still another decade away from the peak?

I'd argue that we still have at least a

few more years to keep this hype cycle

alive. It's pretty obvious now that LLMs

as a technology have plateaued and are

not actually intelligent. When GPT5 came

out a few months ago, it was a huge

disappointment and we're not seeing the

exponential leaps in intelligence that a

truly intelligent self-improving AI

system should be able to make. But don't

get me wrong, though. The current AI

technology is legit amazing. Remember,

we're only a few years into this trend.

programmers were the early adopters of

the prompt casino, but there are

companies out there working day and

night to replace stupid, smelly, squishy

humans. And if you're someone who does

spreadsheets for a living, is a

mid-level manager, or even a graphic

designer, you might no longer be

necessary in the future. AI is

definitely stacking up victims in the

job market, and even activities that

were once respected, like being a Stack

Overflow poster, are now completely

dead, just as I predicted a few years

ago. But another sign the bubble's not

over yet is the fact that most AI

companies are still private. Eventually,

a time will come when you see a wave of

IPOs in the stock market to hand these

bags from VCs over to the public. And

when that wave of IPOs arrives, you'll

know the charade is coming to an end.

And there's a good chance that wave

comes in 2026 as SpaceX, OpenAI, and

Anthropic are all looking to go public

with some of the biggest IPOs in the

history of the world. But before that

happens, one of the biggest drivers to

keep the AI hype going in 2026 will be

robots, humanoid robots. Just a few

weeks ago, 1X started taking orders for

their Neo robot, which can do your

laundry, wash your dishes, and just be a

friendly, helpful slave that will never

rebel. In addition, Figure Robots and

Tesla Optimus are being pushed as

replacements for manual labor in

factories. As of today, the tech is

still pretty bad and requires a lot of

tea operation, but companies like Google

and Nvidia are providing the base

technology that allows any founder to

Frankenstein together some clanker and

raise a bunch of money. 2026 is the year

we'll finally see these things roll off

of assembly lines. But what if you could

turn yourself into a robot or cyborg?

Well, wearable AI tech is another big

trend to watch for. We've already had

massive flops like the Rabbit and Humane

Pin, but OpenAI is still in

collaboration with Johnny IV to make

some wearable that will actually be good

this time, or so they say. In addition,

you've got old companies like Nike

building things like batterypowered

shoes that will finally allow the white

man to jump. And I can't wait for the

NBA to approve this and see dudes

dunking from half court. But until that

day comes, I'd rather just get my

entertainment from virtual worlds in my

VR headset. The Apple Vision Pro was

supposed to finally make virtual reality

mainstream, but as I correctly

predicted, it was a massive flop. I got

a lot of hate from Apple fanboys for

making that prediction, but it's not

over for the Vision Pro. There are

rumors of a lowerc cost version in the

works that could turn this flop around.

Meanwhile, Meta is making huge

investments in augmented reality. But

ultimately, I think the VR AR space will

mostly remain an unprofitable niche

area, even though the tech itself is

extremely impressive. But the lion share

of the profits are going to continue

flowing into chip designers like Nvidia

and ARM and chip fabricators like Taiwan

Semiconductor. AI mania has created an

insatiable demand for linear algebra.

And the barriers to entry in this

industry are so high that these

companies will continue to slurp up most

of the profit. The only company that

really screwed things up is Intel, which

is both a chip designer and a fab. And

in 2025, it looked like it was on the

verge of going out of business. But

luckily, Trump stepped in and had the US

government buy a 10% stake in Intel,

thus preventing the free market from

working like a free market. And Intel is

poised to continue its turnaround in

2026. It's just too big to fail. But

cloud providers like Azure are having a

hard time even finding enough

electricity to plug in their Nvidia

GPUs. As demand for AI scales up, it

could lead to a resurgence in nuclear

power even as many countries in the west

start to dismantle their reactors.

China, on the other hand, is building

all kinds of new reactors. But there are

companies like Ollo, which are

attempting to get regulatory approval

for these small modular reactors, which

could potentially give every data center

its own self-contained power source.

Instead of acres of these ugly

intermittent solar farms or wind farms,

the future might have these tiny little

reactors in every neighborhood. But what

could possibly go wrong? And we're

already seeing this play out with

Zuckerberg announcing a big deal with

Olo to put a reactor in Ohio. But maybe

this trend will never play out because

computers get colder and faster, like

billions of times faster, running at

absolute zero temperatures. In 2025, we

saw some major advancements in quantum

computing, most notably with Google's

Willow chip. Then just a few months ago,

Google announced its quantum echoes

algorithm that measures disturbances at

the subatomic scale. For the first time

in history, a quantum computer has

actually run a verifiable algorithm that

surpasses the ability of supercomputers.

The quantum computers have been in

development for decades now. But what's

exciting is that we're finally starting

to see the possibility of practical

applications in the real world. When

quantum computing hits version 1.0,

it'll make the AI bubble look like

child's play, and American and Chinese

researchers are racing to get there

first. But European tech leaders are

also making big strides in technology,

especially when it comes to water bottle

caps. and with the highly unpopular

digital IDs along with central

bankbacked digital currencies. Despite

nobody actually wanting these things,

bureaucrats keep pushing them forward

like it's a speedrun to the Black Mirror

season finale. In the near future, every

government endorsed smartphone will

become a portal to your bank account,

your location, your social media posts,

your adult website visits, and so on.

The UK has been adamant that digital IDs

are coming. While the European Central

Bank recently announced that the

Eurozone's digital euro pilot is moving

into its next phase with the pilot

program expected as soon as mid 2027 and

full issuance of a digital currency by

2029. They can take our lives and they

can take our freedom but they can't take

our JavaScript. On the back end, Node.js

keeps getting better and better and now

supports TypeScript files with

TypeScripping. Meanwhile, Dino keeps

getting better and now has its own

built-in module bundler. But all the

kids these days are talking about bunjs,

a runtime that keeps getting faster, but

also has built-in support for Postgress

and Reddus, making it a very tempting

choice for any new JavaScript project.

On the front end, ReactJS still

dominates despite the fact it sucks. But

in the future, it will suck less now

that the compiler is officially stable.

I'd still take spelt or view or it even

Angular over React, but there's still

new JavaScripts hitting the scene like

Ripple, which should be on your radar in

2026. But if you're looking to level up

your skills this year, you need to check

out Brilliant, the sponsor of today's

video. I'd highly recommend their how AI

works course, which teaches you how to

build a functioning language model from

scratch. You'll get to experiment with

things like feature vectors to edit

facial expressions and images along with

other hands-on lessons that are

personalized to your skill level, so you

can master challenging topics over time.

To check out brilliant.org/fireship

org/fireship to learn for free for a

full 30 days or scan the QR code on

screen to get 20% off an annual premium

subscription with unlimited daily

access. This has been the code report.

Thanks for watching and I will see you

in the next one.