🔮 Predictions for product agencies in 2026

Six years ago I quit my day job to start a product agency called Nicer along with my friends Aeryk and Robert. We’ve gotten to build a bunch of cool apps with great clients in those six years.

I think 2026 will be radically different, because the process of building products has changed completely with AI.

A few thoughts on what that means for agencies like us:

1. Most new products will start with a vibe-coded prototype.

When I meet a new client, they’re usually at the very beginning: with a problem to solve but not much clarity on how to turn that into a product.

That changed in 2025. Today, most clients don’t show up with an idea, or wireframes, or even Figma designs. Instead, they show up with a URL pointing to an app that already works. Mostly.

And they don’t know what to do next.

Product agencies need to chart the course from a vibe-coded prototype to a sellable product, and give clients clarity along the way. Are we keeping any of this code? Starting over? Redesigning the product? What breaks if we scale this? In 2026, we’ll need good answers to those questions.

Starting from scratch and spending months rebuilding a vibe-coded app probably isn’t an option anymore. The path forward is likely a continuation, not a restart, including work like:

Auditing the user flows and identifying steps users might struggle with
Creating a compelling brand that builds trust.
Pulling the brand’s visual identity into the UI, helping it feel more personalized and less like a template
Unblocking features the client is stuck on, and hardening the brittle parts that break every time they make changes
Identifying the parts that don’t scale, and suggesting the right long-term options
And giving the client a path to continue vibe-coding new features, not shutting down the process

2. Most people will think engineering is free

The mainstream public is hearing a message that will get louder in 2026: anyone can build software now. Heck, even Shaq is vibe-coding apps.

To sell engineering, product agencies will be swimming upstream, against the wave of ads from AI companies. “Engineering is not something you have to pay for anymore! AI can do it for free!”

Honestly, parts of it are free now. In 2026, more and more code at Nicer will be prompted, not written by hand. But that code will be prompted mostly by senior-level designers and engineers who know what to ask for, and how to evaluate the results.

“I’ve never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored” — Andrej Karpathy

AI-first product engineering will have some great benefits. Smaller teams like us will ship faster. More edge cases will be handled out-of-the-gate. “MVP quality” will be higher than ever before.

In 2026, we’ll need to highlight the gap between vibe-coded prototypes and sellable, scalable products. Successful product agencies will be able to sell a path to closing that gap.

3. Clients will want to buy outcomes, not time

Many agencies (sometimes us too!) sell time: a team, sprints, hours.

But in a world where the best designers and engineers are multiplying their effort with AI (and clients know this), time and hours matter less, and are harder to predict.

Clients don’t really want to buy time anyway. They want to buy outcomes:

a product people will understand and use
that’s thoughtful and beautiful
scalable and maintainable
safe and secure
shipping on time

This isn’t new; the best product agencies have always been able to pitch outcomes, regardless of how they actually bill clients and structure engagements. In 2026, agencies will feel more and more pressure to actually sell outcome-based engagements.

4. Strategy 📈, Implementation 📉

There are two kinds of agency work:

Strategy: design and technical decision-making, usually done by agency principals
Implementation: production work, usually done by, junior-level designers/devs, or outsourced talent

The cost of implementation will trend toward zero in 2026 because of AI, for all kinds of work.

The business model of building big agencies around high-volume, low-level production work (and taking large margins on that work) is evaporating. (This is actually great news for smaller, leaner agencies like us.)

At Nicer, when we talk about the work we do, we should be talking about:

taste (brand, creative direction, design quality)
strategy (what to build next, and how)
risk management (security, scalability, compliance)

Importantly, these things aren’t going to be done by AI in 2026. (I’ll leave the 2027 predictions for next year. 😉)

5. Thoughtful design will become even more of a quality signal

In the next few years, tons of new vibe-coded products will launch with brittle functionality, little-to-no brand, out-of-the-box component styling, poor hierarchy, and confusing UX flows.

The “AI smell” of vibe-coded apps will be as noticeable as it is in ChatGPT writing. In response, thoughtful design will become even more of a quality signal.

Well-designed products in 2026 won’t feel like a one-shotted prompt. They’ll feel like somebody cared about both the big-picture architecture and the UI details. That care will become more valuable in a world of vibe-coded apps, not less.

Let’s have a great year and build some great products. 💪

– Jay

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