After 2025: What’s Next for AI Coding in 2026 - The Merge (by CodeRabbit) - Episode1

2025 was chaos in the best way: DeepSeek cracked open the model monopoly and proved world-class open weights don't need infinite budgets. Vibe coding went mainstream - prompt your way to an app without staring at code - unlocking ideas for non-engineers but flooding repos with bugs (our data shows AI code spawns ~1.7× more issues than human-written). Agents evolved from demos to long-running beasts, CLI tools like Claude Code let AI run wild in terminals, Cursor/Windsurf supercharged IDEs for pros, Gemini 3 stormed back with killer reasoning, Anthropic scooped Bun, and MCP + Agent Skills…