Draft Evolving interactions with AI in 2026

Living through the first couple of weeks of 2026 it is clear, whether I like it or not, that it will be yet another year dominated by AI. I have to be honest, looking back, this growing presence is something I’ve had mixed feelings about, having gone through the usual cycles of excitement, epiphany, frustration and despair that countless of us seem to have experienced. It’s been a technical and emotional rollercoaster like discovering, falling in love with, then good old times

Up #1: Before GitHub Copilot, there was GitHub Codex, the predictive autocomplete for VS Code. This was great for those obscure pandas incantations that never seemed to make it into muscle memory. A function signature, maybe a comment or the beginning of the line combined_df = and more likely than not the right completion would show up as ghost text.

Down #1: Over the Christmas break of 2023, I set myself two challenges: use SQL to reason about molecular assembly; and write a Raspberry Pi camera image acquisition GUI to make life easier for my students who had to use the command line to capture images and a text file for documents. With the camera challenge specially Codex seemed completely clueless. This was around the raspicam to libcamera transition and there just didn’t seem to be a way to prompt it to use the more modern stack (in fairness to Codex, there was probably next to nothing in its training data about this).

Up #2: In 2024, when GitHub Copilot’s Edit mode popped up in my editor one day, there was a feeling of immense power as I prompted Claude Sonnet 3.5 to create interactive web UIs that I could never dream of having the time to learn coding on my own. I even prototyped an IDE for probabilistic modelling.

Down #2: Then the code (and dead code) started to grow, I lost track of how and where things were implemented, what was still in use vs left over from the last prompt. You had to be sure that the right source files were added to context or the model would ignore/reimplement existing functionality, blissfully unaware that it’s right there.