I watched AI Agents Take Over the Cloud Live from Google NEXT '26, and Nothing Will Be the Same

This is a submission for the Google Cloud NEXT Writing Challenge Las Vegas, April 22, 2026. The lights are bright. The room holds thousands of developers. And up on stage, Google is about to change the way we think about software forever. The Morning Everything Shifted I woke up at 6:30 AM just to watch a keynote. That sentence alone should tell you something. I have watched hundreds of tech keynotes over the years. Product launches. "One more thing" moments. Slides full of benchmarks. But Googl