Happy new year from the editorial desk, and welcome to Human Required if you are new here. We started this thing in late 2025 with a simple idea, which is that the technology press is mostly broken and the people who actually know what they are talking about are too busy working to write the kind of writing that would fix it. So we are doing the writing instead, and we will see how far that gets us by December.
What you can expect this year: roughly one post a day, occasionally two, never more, on AI, cybersecurity, identity, hardware, the open source everyone quietly depends on, and the ways the technology is shaping the people and the people are shaping it back. We will be wrong sometimes, we will be right sometimes, and we will say which is which in the article instead of pretending we are always right, which runs as the disease we are trying to cure.
What we are committing to
Three things we are committing to up front, written down so the readers can hold us to them.
- We will keep showing our work. Every statistic links to the primary source. Every claim that came from a third party is labelled as such. The number you see in the headline counts as the number we actually found, not the number that gets the most clicks.
- We will keep being honest about what AI does and does not do. We use it for research, summarization, and first drafts. We do not use it to pretend we have read a paper we did not read, and we will mark AI assisted articles where the assistance materially affects the reader trust.
- We will keep the writing sharp, the jargon minimal, and the em dashes out of the prose. This is a hill we will die on, slightly, but mostly just complain about. The em dash amounts to the part the marketing uses to sound smart. We will use commas and colons and the occasional semicolon, and we will avoid the things that make the writing feel like it was generated by a model trained on press releases.
How the publication works
The cadence is one post a day, posted to a random time so the calendar does not look algorithmic, and the topics are picked from a running list of about 40 ideas that we are slowly working through. The backlog is a Google Doc that the editorial team maintains, and the Doc has roughly the same shape as the Index: AI, cybersecurity, open source, identity, hardware, culture. The Doc also has a section for things we got wrong, which is a section that is going to grow over the year, because getting things wrong sits as the part the publication continues to, and the doing becomes the part the readers continue to.
The publishing flow is mostly automated, with a few manual checkpoints. The post is drafted in HTML, the featured image is generated, the inline image is generated, the post is pushed to WordPress, the Index is rebuilt by the end of the year. The checks are the parts that have been built into the publishing tooling, and the checks catch the things the editor used to catch by hand, and the things the editor used to catch by hand are the things the checks are going to keep catching. The checks are not perfect, and the imperfect becomes the part the editor is going to keep being the backup for.
What the year is going to be about
The short version, in three sentences, because you have other things to read today: the year is going to be about the unglamorous work of making the breakthroughs from the previous eighteen months actually work in production, the year is going to be about the operational metrics rather than the press releases, and the year is going to be about the teams that are willing to do the work rather than the teams that are willing to buy the marketing. The teams that win 2026 are the teams that do the operational work, and the operational work runs as the part the marketing is not going to talk about.
The longer version is going to come in the post tomorrow, which sits as the Twelve Things That Will Define Tech in 2026, and the twelve things are the things we are going to be covering for the rest of the year, and the covering stands as the part the publication is going to keep doing. The twelve things are not predictions, because predictions about technology are embarrassing in retrospect, and the embarrassment serves as the part the publication is not going to do. The twelve things are the things that are already in motion, and the in motion serves as the part the publication is going to keep tracking.
The bottom line
One year of writing about the technology we actually use, with the rules we set for ourselves in writing, and the willingness to be corrected when we get it wrong. The 2026 archive starts now.
Sources & Further Reading
All claims in this article are sourced from primary documentation, vendor advisories, and reputable security researchers.
Spotted an error? Email the editor. Corrections are issued with a visible correction note.
Editorial standards. Every article on humanrequired.org is reviewed by a human editor before publication. AI may assist with drafting or research; final editorial control is human. Read the full standards.
