Gemini 3 Flash should NOT EXIST. TOP 2% Engineering. /PLAN 2026

Quick Overview

The central thesis for achieving top 2% engineer status in 2026 revolves around increasing trust in agentic systems, which the speaker defines as the 'Year of Trust,' enabling greater speed, iteration, and impact through advanced agentic workflows like custom agents and multi-agent orchestration.

Key Points: Gemini 3 Flash is described as an 'absolutely insane' model that 'should not exist' because it offers top-three intelligence at a top-five price, with usage on Open Router showing a 385% token increase preview usage. The main limitation for engineers is no longer the models themselves, but the engineer's ability to trust their agents, making 2026 the 'Year of Trust,' where trust equals speed, speed equals iteration, and iteration equals impact. Top 2% engineers will continue to bet on Anthropic due to its consistent execution, best tooling for engineers (like Claude Code), and superior performance in long sequences of tool calls, which is the measure of trust. Tool calling represents the greatest opportunity, as only 15% of output tokens are tool calls, which the speaker views as a rough proxy for impact; pushing agents to call longer chains of tools directly increases impact. The most important bet is on building custom agents, as 'one well-crafted agent can replace thousands of hours of manual work' by solving custom problems for money, requiring expertise in prompting, context engineering, and SDK usage. The next frontier after custom agents is multi-agent orchestration, where 'one agent is not enough,' requiring lead agents (command level agents) to delegate, monitor, and coordinate worker agents to increase compute and verification. The speaker predicts the AGI hype will die as engineers focus on practical agent delivery, leading to the emergence of the first end-to-end agentic engineers who ship features 'prompt to production, no review, no human in the loop.'

Context: Andy Dev Dan, who places himself in the top 10% of engineers using agentic technology, outlines his roadmap for becoming a top 2% agentic engineer by 2026, based on his accumulated work and conversations. This plan is structured around a central thesis for the upcoming year, which he identifies as the 'Year of Trust,' contrasting the current state of powerful foundational models like Gemini 3 Flash and Opus 4.5 with the necessary human element of trusting these automated systems to scale impact.