It’s traditionally been very expensive to have custom-built software for any business - small or large. Even with low-code/no-code tools, there still had to be someone in charge of figuring out all the details, and mapping from the subject matter expert to the actual solution.
Application Creation
Now, in 2026, we have multiple LLM tools that can generate a complete application for you. The amazing thing is that it will work, out of the gate, in ways that it didn’t in 2025. The trajectory is pretty clear - we can use ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, or lots of other tools to create solutions for us.
Creating the first version has always been the most straight forward part of application development - the complicated parts tend to be the ongoing maintenance, fixing the technical debt incurred in the intial version and future updates, and understanding what the original application did after the developers move on.
Operations
If we end up creating all of these new software development projects, how do we operate them going forward?
Governance, maintenance, and reliability will be more important than ever. Are the frameworks, platforms, and tools we’ve traditionally used for software development the right tools for the future?
We’ve seen that software development has completely changed between 2023 and 2026. Now we need the operational layer for that software to match.