[Culonavirus]

Not sure about Docker (lol) but stakeholders are definitely more open to "building your own" now. It used to be that to be agile as a business you would seek out already built software and rent it, as it typically was cheaper than building and maintaining your own (I say typically due to stuff like vendor lock-in and such). But these days, and especially in 2026 with the widespread use of agents and harnesses, that formula has started to change. Even though the SOTA models are really good now, it's the harness and the "fluff" around the model that makes it a game changer. The developer is no longer the one writing or even gluing the code together, the harness does that. Pair that with context preserving mechanisms and tools that emerged (automatic context compaction, AGENTS, TOOLS, MCP...) and you can get to a state where you start a new thread in Codex and it knows your systems, your dbs, can smartly explore code it doesn't know and db data patterns etc., it can explain stuff to a new developer (and be correct most of the time and have time to spend on the developer)... all of which SIGNIFICANTLY reduces the risk you take on yourself as a company when you "build your own". What's $10k/year to any half-working semi-profitable company? Nothing. But in 2026, you can build and maintain A TON of software for that, much more than your "average IT needs" company may ever use.

I'm sure the very large (and very small) businesses will keep their absolute need for (or the lack of) inhouse developers, but everything in between will probably get compressed to one or two inhouse architects in direct contact with the stakeholders and the rest will be contractors working with Codex-like automation.