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Three key strategies for developers in 2026: become independent by shipping quickly and deploying demos instead of endless meetings, embrace AI tools strategically for speed without losing understanding, and build open-source projects to stand out with public work and real user feedback. The focus is on being a doer who finishes things, using AI wisely for completions and refactoring rather than blind copy-pasting, and creating shareable projects that demonstrate skills publicly.

3 Things You Must Do to Stand Out as a Developer in 2026

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Nice video. In terms of not avoiding AI, I would argue slightly different.
In the video, you say good AI usage includes speeding up boring parts.
But that’s objective, and not always the case. Sometimes the “boring parts” is the part you still need to learn or practice. Sometimes, it’s a crucial part that you just don’t want to mess with. Sometimes, it’s just something that’s very time consuming. It doesn’t necessarily mean that AI usage is good for those cases.
Using AI well mainly involves:
<ul>
<li>learning concepts and new technologies with AI explanations and examples</li>
<li>using it to speed up development (assuming you are already experienced and can guide the AI effectively)</li>
</ul>
That’s about the simplest explanation.

Its more and more difficult to stand out. I wonder if gaining such exceptional skills is worth the effort in 2026.