7 months in, how are my predictions doing?

Well, The Economist country of the year is syria (With Argentina the runner up). Let's look at my "12 predictions between now (back when now was may 2025) and May 2026. 

1. Did context windows become the bottleneck again?  They definitely didn't grow as expected. Gemini has gone from 1.5 to 3.0 and still is 1M context window (one can only assume they have been investing more of their time in getting back to the Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview 05-06 sweet spot). 

Claude Code has pretty good compaction . Tool use makes use of paged limits. In this and other ways, we have worked around context limits. It is not as obvious a bottleneck, because we can work around it in ways we couldn't when it was 4096 token limits. But I would say we are on track to have something of a bottleneck in this respect, though I am a bit less confident in this prediction then I was then. Even though context windows seem to have hit a wall, in that model providers aren't very interested in expanding them, it seems. 

Context windows are def a bottleneck. But I think 2026 will have alot of interesting techniques to address it. I will write an article in a few months about techniques i have seen already

2. Did "RAG roar back"?It either roared back or only got more important. But, it is not something people talk about like they used to. it is more assumed and comes in many forms, but is part of the standard agentic profile. In the last 6 months, the nature of my latest clients has made the broader AI landscape equally on par on my radar as the world of Gemini models, Vertex AI, ADK, etc... And that makes it even more stark. Progressive disclosure is a big part of why Claude Skills are good. Moving from  I was surprised to find almost no good managed RAG on AWS. Retrieval is definitely part and parcel of almost any agentic system. 

 Claude code does not have semantic search as a code-search tool.  Though maybe it does for certain specific parts of its architecture. i will get back to you about that as i feel like i did see something like that with memory architecture 

3. Did data science as a tool become a standard agent tool? Nope. And alot of coding agents including claude code are relatively bad at operating within ipynb files. That is something that needs work. That could be a good project to do. 

In large part though, basically everything you can do in a terminal became that so yes, but the point is moot. Agents got much better much faster then expected. 

4. Did AI power scientific breakthroughs? Yes. 

6. Has slop continued? Yes, and yet people are starting to miss the old slop. People are nostalgic for will smith eating spaggetti which is now sort of a CS AI benchmark. 

7. Did coding styles and culture will change as AI-first coding stacks and vibe-coding stacks become widespread? I would like to do some research on this but I think so. My stack no longer uses an IDE. It also does not use agent frameworks such as langchain. I use filesystem alot more then i used to. 

Predictions that were too obvious to pat myself on the back about:

"AI will power major scientific breakthroughs. Obviously."

Predictions I got mostly right so far or still believe in:

"Context windows may become a bottleneck again. Context windows have grown, but our aspirations have, too. "

"RAG will fade, then come roaring back. As a direct consequence of #1, RAG will start to swing back to being indispensable. The key difference is that this time around, most people will (hopefully) rely on out-of-the-box managed RAG solutions."

Agents will integrate more deeply with enterprise data.

Slop will continue. Platforms for community content, email clients, and any other type of content feed will rise and fall based on how good they are at not letting slop find its way into your feed and inbox.

"Coding styles and culture will change as AI-first coding stacks and vibe-coding stacks become widespread."

Predictions that didn't materialize, yet, but I still believe in :

"Data science and traditional ML will become standard agent tools. AI Begetting AI."

"Another chip shortage will surely come. A safe enough bet. I hope not, though."

Predictions I have less faith in, in some way:

"Fine-tuned and quantized edge models will help solve many problems."