The Infrastructure War: Why AI Prompting is Dead, and Agentic Environments are Taking Over in 2026
Last week, I noticed something that most users likely brushed off as a minor UI update. I went to tweak a custom model in Google AI Studio and realized my project files weren't where I left them. They hadn't just been moved to a new folder; they had been migrated out of the general-purpose Google Drive ecosystem entirely and into a dedicated, internal "Apps" environment. To the casual observer, it’s a backend cleanup. To anyone paying attention to the $15 trillion AI economy, it’s the opening shot of the Infrastructure War. We’ve spent the last three years obsessed with "prompt engineering" the idea that if you just find the right magic words, the AI will perform. But in 2026, prompting is officially a commodity. The real battle has shifted to Plumbing. If your AI still lives in a cluttered cloud storage folder, you aren’t building an agent; you’re building a bottleneck. From General Cloud to "App Homes" For years, we treated AI like a fancy docu...