DEVOPSdigest

DEVOPSdigest invited experts across the industry — consultants, analysts and vendors — to comment on how AI can support the software development life cycle (SDLC). In Part 18, the final installment in this series, experts offer predictions about how AI will impact developers in 2025 and beyond.

AI + DEVELOPER

Rewriting the AI Equation: Not AI instead of Developer, but AI + Developer: Especially as companies are prompted to take drastic cost-cutting measures in 2025, it would be to no surprise that developers are replaced with AI tooling. But as was the situation when Generative AI first made its debut and now with years of updates and more to come in 2025, it is still not a safe, autonomous productivity driver, especially when creating code. AI is a highly disruptive technology with many amazing applications and use cases, but no sufficient replacement for human developers. I agree with Forrester's prediction that this shift towards AI/human replacement in 2025 is likely to fail, and especially in the long term. I think the combination of AI+developer is more likely to achieve this than AI alone.
Pieter Danhieux
Co-Founder and CEO, Secure Code Warrior

Implementing AI will bring transformative challenges for organizations, including workforce concerns about job security and resistance among employees hesitant to embrace AI-driven interactions. Traditional mentoring and learning pathways could be disrupted, resulting in limited development opportunities for junior staff and leaving a critical gap in skill-building and career growth. To address these challenges, CIOs, CTOs and technology leaders must adopt a proactive approach for collaboration between human employees and AI tools, emphasizing the unique skills that humans bring to the table, such as creativity, critical thinking, and emotional intelligence. By fostering an environment where employees view AI as a partner rather than a replacement, organizations can alleviate fears and enhance morale.
Jason Beres
SVP Developer Tools, Infragistics

AI - the Developer's Apprentice

In 2025, AI will become an indispensable "apprentice" in the developer's toolkit, automating bug fixes, testing, and code optimization. According to O'Reilly, 51% of companies were already using AI-assisted development tools by 2023, and this trend will accelerate. AI in development will bridge skill gaps and reduce error rates by 20% or more, helping developers keep pace with the faster release cycles of DevOps.
Ravi Ithal
CTO and Co-Founder, Normalyze

JUNIOR DEVELOPERS: LOWERING BAR OF ENTRY

I predict that AI tools for development will continue to improve, to the point that it will drastically increase the output of less experienced engineers. It'll continue to lower the bar of entry, but raise the ceiling of what's possible for teams and companies.
Sterling Chin
Senior Developer Advocate, Postman

SENIOR DEVELOPERS: ELIMINATING TOIL

The real surprise has been watching senior engineers who embrace these tools. They're achieving massive productivity gains by directing AI to handle specific tasks using established patterns. Their deep understanding of software patterns lets them effectively "conduct" the AI, even switching programming languages with remarkable ease. Based on these trends we've seen, what I foresee is that AI will continue to eliminate the "toil" that consumes senior developers' time. Take pull request reviews — by having AI perform initial passes and provide instant feedback to developers, we're significantly reducing cycle times and freeing up senior engineers for higher-value work.
Nate Berent-Spillson
SVP, Product Engineering, NTT DATA

LIMITING DEVELOPER GROWTH

AI is going to make it easier to become a developer, but harder to grow as a developer. With the influx of AI coding assistants, full AI-native code editors and even early versions of full on coding AI agents that can build full applications from nothing, it's becoming increasingly easy for anyone to become a developer. But as senior engineers increasingly adopt AI tools to uplevel their own productivity, they might miss out on opportunities to work through problems with more junior engineers, mentoring and coaching them along the way.
Dominik Kundel
Senior Manager Product Management — Emerging Tech & Innovation, Twilio

Companies will need to put an emphasis on collaboration between junior and senior devs. The adoption of GenAI has the potential to stunt the growth of both junior and senior developers. Senior devs will be more adept at leveraging AI, therefore they will rely on it as a productivity tool, spending their time training the AI instead of training junior devs. At the same time, junior devs will be left on the sidelines. Not only does this create a future talent gap, but it prevents the senior devs from continuing to evolve and grow as leaders. For both parties to continue to grow, teams will need to put extra effort into ensuring there is still collaboration between junior and senior developers.
Trisha Gee
Lead Developer Advocate, Gradle

BRIDGING EXPERIENCE GAP

2025 will mark a critical inflection point where AI-augmented development tools become essential bridges across the growing experience gap in enterprise IT, particularly in mainframe environments. Looking at the respondents for the 2024 BMC Mainframe Survey, veteran mainframe experts have declined dramatically from 36% to 13% since 2019 as they retire, while the number of emerging mid-career professionals has risen to 36%, or more than a third of the respondents. In this shifting landscape, AI-powered development assistants will serve as virtual mentors, encoding decades of best practices and institutional knowledge to support the rising generation of practitioners. However, organizations must carefully balance this AI augmentation with robust testing frameworks and quality controls to ensure that increased development velocity doesn't come at the cost of system reliability — especially as less experienced developers become more reliant on AI-generated solutions for complex mainframe operations.
John McKenny
SVP and GM of Intelligent Z Optimization and Transformation, BMC Software

REDEFINING DEVELOPER ROLE: PROBLEM SOLVING

I expect that the idea of what it means to be a software developer will similarly shift. We'll still be writing code but focusing more on novel problems and exploring variations of solutions rather than slogging away at writing tons of boilerplate.
Phillip Carter
Principal Product Manager, Honeycomb

REDEFINING DEVELOPER ROLE: PROMPT ENGINEERING

Developers will struggle with the change in their job descriptions, but there will always be demand for qualified developers — only now they'll be spending more of their time on prompt engineering.
Jason Bloomberg
President, Intellyx

REDEFINING DEVELOPER ROLE: AI MANAGEMENT

AI Agents Will Redefine Developer Roles and Skills: Developers will shift from writing traditional code to orchestrating and managing AI agents. Powered by GenAI-embedded low-code tools, these AI-driven agent systems will become the gold standard for developing and managing enterprise applications. As this transformation unfolds, CIOs and their teams will need to prioritize transactional transparency, robust monitoring, and strong governance to effectively manage these AI agents and applications. With the projected shortage of half a million developers by 2030, and the massive demand for a billion new apps, the role of developers will become even more critical. AI agents and GenAI-powered applications won't just be a competitive advantage — they'll be a necessity for meeting rising expectations and demand.
Jithin Bhasker
GM & VP for the App Engine Business , ServiceNow

REDEFINING PRODUCTIVITY

In 2025, companies will redefine the way they measure developer productivity. Rather than measuring only "developer metrics," such as product quality, delivery speed, and organizational performance, companies will need to look at how well teams are delivering value. Google's DORA report found that GenAI has the potential to slow down development, but the hypothesis that many of us are deriving from this is that the work is possibly changing. In the past, development teams split up a project into smaller, digestible pieces (e.g., adding a button to the user interface, integrating that button in the backend, etc.) that each individual contributor would work on. Now, individual developers are taking on much larger pieces of work, using GenAI to support the coding of individual pieces before putting it all together. This means that the developer's release is technically taking longer, because the work unit they are delivering is much larger. However, I truly believe that developers leveraging GenAI are significantly more efficient and will start to highly outperform competitors that are not leveraging it.
Eric Ledyard
VP of Enterprise Architecture, Coder

INCREASED ACCESSIBILITY

AI tools will become more user-friendly and accessible to a wider range of developers, from seasoned professionals to beginners.
Kumar Chivukula
Co-Founder and CEO, Opsera

PERSONALIZED DEV EXPERIENCE

AI-powered tools are likely to become more personalized and context-aware, adapting to individual developers' preferences and specific project requirements.
Ramprakash Ramamoorthy
Director of AI Research, ManageEngine

AI tools will become more personalized, adapting to individual developer styles and facilitating a more collaborative human-AI workflow.
Rahul Pradhan
VP of Product and Strategy, Couchbase

As machine learning and large-language models (LLMs) experience increased adoption, we anticipate that they will, with the addition of contextual tooling, become more adept at tailoring their responses to the learning preferences of developers and their teams, due to their very adaptive nature. Those who leverage AI/LLMs will benefit from these personalized learning experiences. Perhaps in the next several years we may even see curated learning assistants who adapt to developers' changing needs, workday priorities and preferences on how they ingest information — resulting in better learning outcomes all around.
Pieter Danhieux
Co-Founder and CEO, Secure Code Warrior

Check back tomorrow for 2025 DevOps Predictions.