It is 3am somewhere and a developer is shipping code they did not type. Across town, another developer is asleep because they refuse to touch AI tooling. Both of them think the other one is making a terrible mistake.
This is the state of software development in 2026. There is no middle ground. The middle ground packed its bags sometime around January and nobody has seen it since.
Camp One: The Token Chasers
You know who these people are because they will not shut up about it. They are shipping at a pace that makes no sense. Projects that would have taken a team of five and six months are coming out of single-person operations in weeks. They talk about context windows the way previous generations talked about RAM. They have opinions about which model handles database schemas better. They have muscle memory for /compact.
Their day does not end at 5pm. It does not end at midnight. It ends when the context window gets too long or when they physically cannot keep their eyes open. Not because someone is making them work. Because the gap between having an idea and seeing it exist has collapsed to almost nothing, and that feeling is difficult to walk away from.
