How Do You Design a Code Retreat in 2026?

In November, it’s time for the Global Day of Code Retreat. That’s usually a day where surprisingly many (senior) developers leave their caves and congregate for Pizza and some TDD.

In 2026, participation in live events for anything job related, and especially for anything software, has declined a ton. Global problems and local problems compound. Local to my community, pressure on the dev job market is unprecedented. Automotive software dev leaves the country (Germany), manufacturing and industry overall is struggling around here, from traditional industry to agriculture. People everywhere are confused, afraid, and the country’s chancellor Friedrich Merz is #nichtMeinKanzler i.e. rather unpopular and failing to be a good human bean overall, which includes his cabinet of clowns, and worsens things with almost every step. So people are unhappy, afraid, and jobless on top. There’s not much left of Maslow’s pyramid.

And software devs don’t code as much because they delegate to LLM GenAI.

What craft will be left, what is there to hone, what do you focus on? – Spoiler, I don’t yet have a good answer.

That question can be tackled from many different perspectives:

• What remains of the software craft?
• What do developers do daily?
• What do developers need to do in the future?
• What can juniors learn from seniors?
• Why should I even care?

Answering all of these is material for a book or three. After all, “why should I care” can quickly lead into existential thoughts about what a good life is. That’s a hard (and fuzzy) problem.

Looking into the future is impossible, too. So we can only put forward guesses. Even well-informed ones, aka those that feel more solid to us, are just that: guesses. We don’t know anything, because we can’t.

A code retreat in 2026 that focuses on the daily work of programmers would be possible, but will likely be AI centric, because that’s the current state of things and the trajectory of companies.

“What remains of the craft” is a combination of both looking into the future and asking deep questions about life and work in general. I can’t know, being just one person in a particular kind of job situation that doesn’t resemble the industry. We need to figure this out together. And that can be part of a retreat, actually. Which bring me to a bonus question:

How can we inspire each other and work on shared values for the next year? And the year after?

That’s also hard, but it’s a different question: it’s a practical question with practical answers from practical experiments, opposed to factual-sounding statements about the future, i.e. projections, i.e. guess-work.

To design a code retreat for November in 2026, the job is not just to bring TDD to the unwashed masses anymore. (Although that’s still needed in my opinion from looking at the business ‘best’ practices around here!)

To design a code retreat for November in 2026, the job of facilitators is to provide an opportunity for growth for software crafters.

This is an easier question.

A formalized version with the familiar why/how/what model to order thought:

• Why offer a code retreat? So we can grow, individually and as a community, especially in uncertain times.
• How do you offer a room for growth? E.g. via enablement, remove blockades for growth, and encouragement, to try things that put you in a place to learn.
  • This is an individual concern! Everyone will need something different.
  • From that follows that everyone needs to participate in the set and setting.
  • So we need to do this not as a pre-planned seminar, but e.g. as an open space or lean coffee, in a format that encourages to share, talk, plan and recover.
• What do you offer?
  • A room. Spacious enough to experiment, move around, create smaller pockets.
  • An agenda. Open to change and adaptation. No strict plan, otherwise it’s hard to make it fit.
  • Community. Let people (who may be strangers) talk and share and be human. Acknowledge that everyone has different hopes, fears, doubts.

Wait, how can I offer community, I’m just one …?

You cannot create community ‘onto’ someone, for someone else, it emerges from bringing like-minded (or like-worried) people together so they have an opportunity to commune. Get us neckbeards out of our caves, lure us with interesting challenges, then rein us in with low-threshold practices to get us to talk and share. You can’t guarantee the outcome, you can only prepare a fertile ground.

We need to discuss this in our local community in more detail. I don’t have a framework for success for this. But we have a couple of hunches on how to approach this and hone a craft and develop a tradition in a time where touching the tools already feels pointless.