Developer Productivity Will Decline in 2025 | Predictions from LinearB’s Ori Keren

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:07)
Hey, everyone, I'm your host, Ben Lloyd Pearson. And today, I am delighted to be joined by Ori Keren, co-founder and CEO at LinearB. Thanks for joining us today, Ori.

**Ori Keren** (0:18)
Hi, Ben, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:21)
Ori, as always, it's really great to have you on our show. And Andrew, I wanna welcome you to your first ever episode of Dev Interrupted.

**Andrew** (0:28)
Thank you, Ben. I'm really excited to be here.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:30)
We've actually dedicated some time next week to introduce yourself to our audience. So definitely want everyone to tune in next week to wrap up our season with us and get to learn about who Andrew is and what role he's gonna play in Dev Interrupted moving forward. But today, I wanna focus on what we've come here to talk to Ori about, and that is predictions for the year 2025 We're rapidly approaching the end of the year. And as we reflect back on all the things that have happened here in 2024, figured this would be a good time to start thinking about what we think software engineering is gonna look like in 2025 So, just at a high level, Ori, like tell us, what do you think are some of the biggest trends that you see shaping software engineering in 2025?

**Ori Keren** (1:14)
Yeah, sure. So, I'm gonna surprise you and start with AI, which I think is like the biggest trend that everybody's trying to wrap their head around. How will it look? I think in two separate tracks, there's one where all the IDEs and the place where you get assistance, where it's not still like agent. It's not an agent. I think these technologies will mature. We can speak later on like who's more benefitting from them and has a better match to utilize them. But as we spoke to leaders this year, it was hard for them still to quantify, they get productivity gain from this and what is it exactly? It seems like it's in early adoption.
I predict that 2025 these technologies will mature and it will become more ingrained into the day-to-day of a lot of the developers. By the way, I think mainly junior developers, but not only. Then you have the other side of all the agentic AI and AI agents that can pop in and take a Jira ticket and issue a pull request based on a Jira ticket. I think this, it's almost like in phase before. This will be experimentation year for these types of things. There's a lot of obstacles still to overcome in order to embed this thing. So my prediction is that it's going to be an interesting year with AI agents in SDLC, but it's still be more of experimentation this year.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (2:46)
Yeah, honestly, I don't think we can get through an episode anymore without talking about AI, because it truly is dramatically changing everything we know about how... It's not just software developers that are feeling this impact. I feel like it's all people who do informational work. We're all being impacted by this. Just like software developers seem to be one of the first big waves that it's really becoming mainstream and taking off. That's probably going to have a big impact on engineering organizations in this next year.
Do you think today is when they're going to start seeing those huge impacts, or do you still think there are other tools out there that engineering teams should be looking to adopt over the next year?

**Ori Keren** (3:28)
You're asking if there are more technologies and more trends that will be impactful in 2025, or are you still talking specifically about AI?

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (3:36)
What tools are going to have the biggest impact over the next year? Is it AI, or is it going to be AI's impact on the other tools they use, or are there still other tools out there that we should be thinking about, so that we're not completely focused on this one?

**Ori Keren** (3:48)
There's other things that are going to happen, other predictions that I have in other areas, but just to put AI to bed for a second, I think it's about how you integrate this thing into your existing tool chain. Everybody talks about, hey, what it will replace, what it won't replace. I think it will still take time to understand how do you orchestrate all of this? How do you embed these technologies? When do you apply the human resource? When are you letting agents go and do their thing? In terms of effecting the tool chain, I think it's more about how you combine and how they live side by side. Some other interesting things that I think are going to happen in 2025 or some other trends that are relevant. Well, I'm not going to surprise anybody, but cybersecurity is still going to be something huge. I think you can see it from the macro level, the world is shaking from any angle that you look at it. So it just raises more cyber threats, and cybersecurity definitely is going to still play a major role in everything companies do. The two that I'm really excited about are developer productivity and developer experience, and what do we do in these areas. But I don't know, I'll let you lead, and when do you want to talk about these topics?