Six Months in AI Feels Like Six Years: What Changed Since Q4 2025

Six Months in AI Feels Like Six Years If you blinked, you missed it. The gap between Q4 2025 and Q1 2026 wasn't just another quarter—it was a generational leap in how we build with AI. The Shift Nobody Talks About Six months ago, we were still debating whether AI agents were practical. Now the question isn't if you use agents—it's how many and what for. The conversation shifted from "Can agents be useful?" to "How do I orchestrate ten of them without losing my mind?" The MCP (Model Context Protocol) ecosystem exploded. What started as Anthropic's experimental protocol became the de facto standard for connecting agents to tools. If you're building agents without MCP support, you're building for 2024. What Got Faster Tool calling went from clumsy JSON wrestling to semantic understanding. Models don't just call functions anymore—they understand what the tools do and chain them intelligently. Context windows broke through the ceiling. We went from "fit a function" to "fit your entire codeb