End of year, time to make predictions that I can either take credit for or conveniently forget about. But honestly, some of these trends feel so clear right now that calling them "predictions" is almost generous. Let's go.
AI Will Go Mainstream
This is the big one. ChatGPT launched a few weeks ago and it's already everywhere. My non-technical friends are using it. My parents are asking me about it. That level of mainstream awareness for an AI tool is unprecedented.
I think 2023 is the year AI moves from "cool demo" to "part of the daily workflow" for millions of people. Not just developers. Writers, marketers, designers, students. The tools aren't perfect, but they're good enough to be useful, and that's the tipping point.
For developers specifically, I expect Copilot-style tools to become standard. The question won't be "do you use AI coding tools" but "which one do you use." The code generation quality will improve, and more specialized tools will appear for specific languages and frameworks.
The bigger question is what this means for the job market. I don't think AI will replace developers in 2023 or even close to it. But I think it will change what developers spend their time on. Less typing boilerplate, more reviewing generated code, more time on architecture and design. The developers who learn to work effectively with AI tools will have a significant advantage.
Web3 Will Cool Down Significantly
I've been saying this for a few months now, and the FTX collapse in November pretty much confirmed it. The speculative mania is dying. NFT trading volumes are down 90% from the peak. Crypto prices have crashed. Web3 startups are laying off people.
I want to be clear: I don't think the technology is dead. Smart contracts, decentralized protocols, and cryptographic verification are real innovations. But the market around them was wildly overheated, and 2023 will be a correction year. The grifters will leave. The builders will stay. The projects that survive will be the ones solving real problems, not the ones promising 100x returns.
For developers, this is actually good news. If you're interested in blockchain development, 2023 will be a better time to learn than 2021 was. Less noise, more signal. The tutorials will be about building useful things instead of launching tokens.
Remote Work Stays
Some companies are pushing return-to-office mandates. I think most of those will quietly fail or be scaled back. The talent market for developers is still competitive, and developers overwhelmingly prefer remote or hybrid work. Companies that demand five days in the office will lose people to companies that don't.
Hybrid will probably become the norm for larger companies. Two or three days in the office, the rest remote. Fully remote will remain common at startups and mid-size tech companies. The "remote work is dead" narrative from some CEOs is wishful thinking.
The tooling for remote work will continue improving. Better async communication tools, better video conferencing, better virtual collaboration spaces. I don't think any current tool has really nailed the remote collaboration experience yet. There's room for someone to build something significantly better than Slack plus Zoom plus Notion.
TypeScript Becomes the Default
TypeScript adoption has been climbing steadily for years, and I think 2023 is the year it effectively becomes the default for new JavaScript projects. Not because everyone suddenly loves type systems, but because the ecosystem has reached a point where not using TypeScript means missing out on better tooling, better autocomplete, and better library support.
More framework authors are writing in TypeScript first. More libraries ship with built-in type definitions. The gap between TypeScript and JavaScript developer experience in VS Code keeps widening. It's harder and harder to justify starting a new project without it.
The Rise of Edge Computing
Vercel, Cloudflare Workers, Deno Deploy, Fly.io. The "run your code at the edge" trend has been building, and I think 2023 is when it becomes practical for real applications, not just static sites and simple API routes.
Edge databases (like Cloudflare D1 and PlanetScale) are making it possible to have both compute and data at the edge. When your database is also globally distributed, the latency improvements are dramatic. I've seen API response times drop from 200ms to under 50ms just by moving to edge deployment.
The DX still needs work. Cold starts, limited runtime APIs, and debugging edge functions are all pain points. But the performance benefits are real enough that more teams will adopt this pattern in 2023.
Developer Tooling Gets Better
Honestly, developer tooling improves every year, but the pace seems to be accelerating. Turborepo and Nx for monorepo management. Vite replacing webpack as the default bundler. Tailwind becoming the standard CSS approach. Playwright gaining ground on Cypress for testing.
I think 2023 will bring more "Vite moments," where a new tool dramatically simplifies something that used to be painful. The JavaScript ecosystem in particular is going through a maturation phase where the "right way" to do things is becoming clearer, even if there are still too many choices.
The Confidence Level
I'm most confident about AI going mainstream. That's already happening and the trajectory is obvious. I'm also pretty confident about the Web3 cooldown. The FTX aftermath will scare away casual speculators.
Remote work staying is high confidence but not certain. A recession could shift the power balance back to employers. TypeScript and edge computing are more gradual trends that might take longer than a single year to fully materialize.
I'll revisit these in December 2023 and see how I did. If history is any guide, the things I'm most confident about will be right, and the things I'm unsure about will surprise me in ways I didn't predict. That's how it always goes.