2025: When Everything Changed for Developers
The message I shared with our R&D team after achieving 80% AI adoption
I’m a Staff Engineer at Lifen. Last year (in 2025), I spent almost all my time increasing AI adoption internally—among developers and across all departments at Lifen—through an internal project called “SmartOps.”
For over 10 years, Lifen has been working every day to fulfill its mission: improve patient care pathways and clinical research.
To achieve this, we develop various products, all based on artificial intelligence that analyses medical documents, classifies them, and structures them. Every month we process millions of documents. Documents we send with Lifen Documents, integrate into patient records with Lifen Integration, or add to cohorts for scientific studies with Lifen Research.
A decade of selling AI. It was time to embrace it ourselves.
It’s very easy for me to remember the public release of ChatGPT—November 2022. That’s the month I became a father for the first time. My child transformed my personal life - OpenAI took care of my professional one…
Since then (especially in 2025), I’ve stopped Googling and the terminal has become my tool of choice (I’m not from the vim generation…). My knowledge, my experience (my failures), and my critical thinking are more valuable than ever. I feel like I’m having more impact every day.
Claude Code was released in February 2025. In that impossibly short time, it achieved 80% daily adoption across our entire R&D team. We chose to deploy it via the LiteLLM gateway to maintain fine control over our data.
The full story of how we rolled out SmartOps and drove AI adoption across Lifen could fill another article—maybe next time.
For now, I wanted to share what this transformation means for us as developers.
The message I shared with our R&D team:
2025 marked a turning point in the developer profession. Our profession has never evolved so much in such a short time.
The last few months (especially December), the release of the latest models (Opus 4.5, Gemini 3 Pro…) have shifted AI-powered development into high gear.
Some skeptics from a few months ago (👋 DHH) are now believers.
Manual coding is becoming rarer (some Lifeners say they write less and less code themselves), and some even say that what once fulfilled them—the fluency of mastering a language—has now become a source of frustration!
What’s next?
The technical barrier is lowering. Perfectly mastering a framework or technology is still valuable but no longer enough.
We need to develop new skills and master new tools: context management, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP...
We need to understand why the LLM gets things wrong—and how to guide it better.
We need to make our best practices and quality standards explicit—and stay critical of its output.
Iterate daily on the context (especially the Claude.MD that needs constant updating).
Write crystal-clear design notes, meticulously crafted JIRA cards, and plan (in the sense of actually making plans) what we want to build before building it.
If we want to move faster, we need to stay in control of our safety nets: tests, linters, SAST, sandboxed environments…
We need to optimise the LLM’s flow so these guardrails activate automatically and very quickly (via hooks, for example).
Soft skills become more important: communication, understanding our domain, adjacent disciplines, and of course our end users.
Gradually, everyone shifts from a ‘producer’ role to an architect role with a product/business/end-user vision.
The technical barrier is decreasing—but everyone’s level and impact is increasing.
Impact on Lifen?
We’re even better equipped to fulfill our mission.
We’ll be able to develop more use cases, get our ideas into our users’ hands faster.
We can do more with less friction: we’ll be able to fix our vulnerabilities faster, spend more time thinking together about architectural choices...
We’re launching major projects in parallel—focused on increasing our sovereignty, strengthening our control, and improving efficiency—things that would have been unthinkable for our team just a few months ago.
Today we’re launching them, and we’re confident.
Impact for us developers
The Jevons paradox should hold true: When progress increases the efficiency of a resource, consumption of that resource increases.
An engineer who’s burned their fingers pushing a change to production at 6 PM, who’s worked in the trenches (not the glitter of vibe coding), and who masters the business context can now produce much more value for the company.
If companies want to grow their value (to stay competitive)—demand for engineers will also grow.
We have great days ahead!
2026 promises to be just as impactful for our profession.
Let’s stay curious, critical, talk to each other as humans, open our eyes, and enjoy the moment!
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