State of AI for development
Every month since October 2025 we have reviewed what changed for development teams and briefed our clients on it. The public digest is deliberately small: from everything a month produces we pick the three developments we think change decisions, and say what we are telling clients to do about each. Advisory clients get the full review and a tailored edition for their context.
June 2026
State of AI for development: June 2026
The Fable 5 suspension, the first open model past the coding bar and what June's adoption data says about work design.
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May 2026
State of AI for development: May 2026
AI spend became a leadership problem in May, the harness argument got numbers and attackers went after the AI toolchain itself.
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April 2026
State of AI for development: April 2026
The harness consensus arrived, usage-based billing loomed and a 400-organisation study found tool usage up 65 per cent while delivery moved eight.
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March 2026
State of AI for development: March 2026
GPT-5.4 reset the price of frontier capability, computer use closed the verify loop and the infrastructure companies started building for agents as customers.
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February 2026
State of AI for development: February 2026
Coding agents left the IDE, METR put numbers on how far to trust them and the enterprise platforms started shipping governance by default.
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January 2026
State of AI for development: January 2026
January was the month MCP arrived in the enterprise stack. Also: an open-weight coding model at a tenth of the price, and why context engineering now beats model choice.
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December 2025
State of AI for development: December 2025
MCP moved to the Linux Foundation, the skills pattern spread beyond one vendor and capable models got dramatically cheaper.
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November 2025
State of AI for development: November 2025
Three frontier labs claimed the coding crown in a single week, Opus 4.5 made frontier intelligence affordable for daily work and multi-model orchestration started to look like a practice.
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October 2025
State of AI for development: October 2025
Fast IDE-native models changed the feel of agentic coding, Claude Code skills looked like the next pattern to spread and the new AI browsers earned a caution.
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