2025 was the year software teams stopped optimizing models and started optimizing systems.
By December, a few truths were impossible to ignore.
1.Developer Productivity Became the Real Competitive Advantage
By mid-year, every major AI lab had cleared the “good enough reasoning” bar.With model quality converging, the differentiator was no longer raw intelligence.It was how fast teams could ship.
The fastest teams used systems that were:
Declarative: automation defined in YAML and config, not code