How Developer 10x In 2025

How developers can 10x their impact with AI in 2025

It was posted first on MVA on Substack

A short guide for developers and tech leads to focus on the controllable

Gen AI shook up software development in 2024. While predicting what will happen in 2025, some said SaaS is dead. Some said software development is dead. While some of the fearmongers declared so, the reality is more nuanced. The pace of change will accelerate and transform rather than kill the industry. Strong teams will continue to release new tools and models, each promising to reshape the landscape. Strong companies in different industries will continue to figure out the best way to leverage Generative AI to provide the best experience to their customers. How exhilarating!
Throughout this article, we will explore how we can harness the Generative AI and 10x your career, regardless which stage you are in, and some extra tips for the tech leaders in the end.

The path forward: How can we transform?

As we move forward in 2025, here are some universal attitudes everyone should be embracing:

• Be open: Open source and open weight LLM models are the future. More importantly, an open mind is crucial in thriving in this frontier.
• Be exploratory: Everyone is figuring out how to leverage Generative AI. Hence solid practice of experimentation will determine who will find the best way to leverage generative AI.
• Be creative: Experiment through side projects or innovative roles, AI engineers, product engineers, UX engineers and growth engineers could all become more impactful in this new Generative AI era.
• Be concise: Besides, clear communication amplifies your work’s impact. With all the text based input for all the LLM model, a clear writing will be critical to direct the impact of both human and machine.

The road looks slightly different depending on where we stand in our careers. Let’s start with our padawan!

0–3 Years of Experience

In this stage, I recommend fellow engineers to cultivate a strong foundation in software development concepts and best practices. Furthermore, I will also recommend prioritizing activities to build yourself as a dependable and communicative team member so you are valuable to hit the project goals in your team.

Be an Oversharer

You’re likely to discover some new AI tools on a weekly basis. Don’t keep those discoveries quiet—share new IDE, tools and libraries with your colleagues. Your enthusiasm can spark collective growth with the whole team. Here are some up and coming tools you might want to explore: v0.ai to build and deploy web app, Cursor IDE to code in a new paradigm, LangSmith to deploy Gen AI pipeline, HuggingFace for new model experimentation, Perplexity.ai for research and Llama for open source LLM models. All social media platforms can be your friends. If you are a text person, consider x.com or Substack. If you are a presentation person, consider Tiktok or Instagram or Youtube.

Be a Problem-solver

Other than sharing your discovery, you will face a lot of novel problems you might need help to resolve. Proactively seek guidance and practice active listening. Through seeking guidance you can align with your seniors to implement the right solutions. Active listening also builds a strong work relationship with everyone around you. There are tons of articles out there to teach you how to do it. The main point is: Practice. Practice. Practice.

Be your own Project Manager

When you are solving problems, you need to be independent and dependable. Even if AI speeds up coding tasks, you’re responsible for planning, organization, and accountability in your tasks. Learn the fundamentals of project management, and communicate clearly on the expectation with your seniors.
I will write about the essence of project management and its application in my follow up articles.

Be a Proficient Code Reader

As you manage your own project well, naturally you need to improve your speed of delivery. You need solid code reading proficiency. AI can help you not only auto-generate snippets now, they can even build a full web app in a few prompts. Remember that real comprehension of the piece of code you are working on pays dividends in debugging and optimizing. I will write about “how to be productive in a new codebase within one week” in a subsequent article.

4–8 Years of Experience

Congratulations! While in your early-career, you prioritize mastering software engineering fundamentals, such as functional programming, production supports, system thinking… etc. You also learn to identify and mitigate your own project risks. In this stage of career, you should turn to elevate your focus to maintaining high standards for yourself and your team. Take a more proactive approach to minimizing project risks, both on the technical aspect and on the business aspect. How can you capitalize on the current explosion of Generative AI tools and thrive?

Be opinionated in your evaluation of tools

Your passion for technology is now even more valuable as you add experience and insights to your mix. Sharing your experience with insights on how those new tools can help your fellow developers to be even more productive. You may already have some muscle memory on tools you are using (I am a vim guy), keep exploring or even contributing to the AI integration of your favorite toolsets and workflows.
Shiny new AI tools may look impressive, and you have to take into consideration your team’s needs, budget, and alignment with long-term goals.

Be a system thinker

Beside sharing your evaluation of tools, your primary goal should be to design and implement simple, but not simpler solutions. This involves thinking about the overall system architecture and strategically incorporating AI capabilities into it. Don’t just focus on fixing isolated bugs; take a holistic approach to AI implementation. Also ask the reason behind the requirements to make sure you are solving the right problems. This helps build your empathy towards product managers or business stakeholders.
By shifting your focus from tactical bug fixes to strategic AI integration, you’ll be leading the way in AI-driven development, ensuring your solutions are not only functional but also intelligent and future-ready.

Be a craft person of your writing

As you need to communicate your system design, documenting clearly and concisely your successes, failures, and the reasoning behind decisions can create a win-win situation. You can facilitate onboarding for new team members and help them to understand the project’s history and context.
You may want to pick up some writing classes to further improve your writing skills structurally. I recommend the Udemy Ninja Writing course or read On Writing Well.

9+ Years of Experience

As experienced software developers with a history of maintaining quirky systems and resolving hairy production incidents, you will naturally transition into a technical leadership role. This involves shifting from a purely technical focus to becoming a role model for your team members. You will need to consistently push the team towards higher standards and ensure that your projects have a significant impact on the organization.

Be excited

In the rapidly evolving landscape of AI, adaptability and a measured response are essential for maintaining a competitive edge. This is particularly relevant for seasoned professionals who might feel threatened by the rapid advancements. Embracing change and focusing on strategic evolution you can leverage you and your own expertise and strength to navigate the AI revolution effectively.

Be a mentor

Mentorship is also a valuable way to share your knowledge and experience. As a seasoned developer, you possess insights that can greatly benefit others in the field. Your guidance can help them navigate the complexities of software development, avoid common mistakes, and achieve their goals.

Take the time to mentor your colleagues, sharing your knowledge of potential pitfalls and celebrating their successes. Your experience and perspective can be instrumental in their professional development and growth. By offering your support and guidance, you can make a positive impact on their careers and contribute to the overall success of the team.

Be a bridge with all stakeholders

Mentorship builds strong relationships within your team, you also need a strong relationship with your stakeholders. To effectively integrate AI into a company’s operations, it is crucial to establish a shared vision and direction for AI adoption. This involves fostering collaboration and alignment among key stakeholders, including engineers who will develop and implement AI solutions, product managers who will oversee the integration of AI into products and services, clients who will benefit from AI-driven offerings, and executives who will guide the overall AI strategy and maximizing your impact.

Something extra for tech leaders

Be customer-focus

You have to be customer-focus to align the AI adoption for maximum impact. Leverage your strength in design thinking, system thinking and sophisticated knowledge in technology, add in some critical story-telling, you can focus your organization on actions to bring more value for your customers by a customer-focused approach on adopting AI. Sometimes the adoption of Generative AI can be in the background and support the UX in general instead of front and center.

Be strategic to prioritize AI exploration in your organization

Customers are utmost important, equally so for your team. Adopting AI faster and more impactful will be crucial. You should continue to enable your team to learn and share the latest AI knowledge. Also don’t hesitate to invite external experts to bring the latest trends and breakthroughs in Generative AI to your organization if budget allows.

Be a cross pollinator of ideas with all business functions

Once your team is comfortable to learn and share, they will be a great partner for pioneering the use of new AI tools. Quickly prototype with business stakeholders will become paramountally important. If you don’t have a function that works with your business stakeholders on a daily cadence, you should now do so. Also be proactive to enable prototyping initiatives with other departments to know exactly what their pain points are and provide Generative AI solutions.

Be agile in your talent strategy

Having said that, you can expect Gen AI to impact every point in the talent journey, you should reevaluate your talent strategy. I am expecting there is some “hybrid” role that will be created to increase the overall productivity of your team. Consider offering some extra responsibilities to the team to stretch their capacity and capabilities. If the experiment goes well, it will be a win for the company, the team and you. For example, UX designers should try to build some prototypes of their design through generative AI tools and dip themselves into coding. Software engineers should upskill themselves on product management and UX to be a full stack product engineer.

One more thing

If you are considering switching a job, join a team that has the same attitudes towards generative AI with you. Life is too short to debate if we should embrace new technologies. Life is also too short to debate with a team that adopts new technologies without a strategy. Also if you find yourself in a team such a fundamental misalignment, do consider switching to a better team.

Conclusion

I am more than excited to welcome a new era of software development, when the gap of productivity continues to widen for people who can adopt new AI tools effectively and creatively. Now, I’d love to hear your perspective: How will you integrate AI into your software projects? Which considerations guide you most, and how do you envision your career adapting to this next technological wave?

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