The year everything changed – Network Games
January 19, 2026
In popular imagination, “AI” has come to mean the cheap version of ChatGPT, prattling in a grating tone with too many emojis, variously misleading and making things up.
AI, in this view, is a stupid machine that makes stupid text. LLMs can certainly be this thing.
Software circles aren’t much better: LLM-enabled development is about code generation. Tell it to extrude code for a purpose, and maybe it will, and maybe it will work.
The truth of things is far, far stranger than either conception. By the close of 2025, it was possible to know the true purpose of LLMs: to act as the engines for a previously-impossible category of software.
The reason that this piece grabbed me was its opening.
If you asked me in 2024 what my biggest fear was, I’d have told you:
I was afraid my best years were behind me, as someone who builds things.
That speaks to me. I’ve made and built things with software for the better part of 40 years, professionally for 30 or more. Even as my primary focus increasingly became communicating, organising conferences, and connecting people, it remained important to me to make and build things. Often they were tools we used internally to run our conferences and other systems better, but sometimes they were just ideas I wanted to explore.
Clearly something has shifted over the last few weeks. Perhaps people took time off over the holiday period to spend a bit more time working with ChatGPT, Claude, or Google’s large language model offerings, all of which released significantly improved models in terms of capabilities—particularly when it comes to code—in the latter part of last year.
People who gave these models a go 6, 12, or 18 months ago and found them underwhelming came back and realised how much more capable they’ve become. My timeline across social media, in blog posts, and on podcasts is full of people now thinking more deeply about the implications of all this. So over the coming weeks you’ll see here, as you have in recent days, a collection of pieces I think are valuable in helping explore these ideas.
