The Pragmatic Engineer: 2025 Year in Review
Published on 23.12.2025
The Pragmatic Engineer in 2025
TLDR: Gergely Orosz reviews a transformative year in software engineering. AI's explosion, a polarized job market, and accelerating return-to-office mandates defined 2025. The article highlights the most impactful deep-dives and podcast episodes, reflecting on how the industry is adapting to these powerful new forces.
Summary: In his 2025 retrospective, Gergely Orosz captures the pulse of a software engineering landscape fundamentally reshaped by artificial intelligence. The year was marked by the meteoric rise of tools like Claude Code and Cursor, which shifted the developer experience towards "vibe coding" and agent-driven development. This wasn't just about autocomplete; it was about a new partnership between engineer and machine, a theme explored in depth with the creators of Claude Code and the MCP protocol.
From an architectural and team leadership perspective, the year presented a paradox. While AI tools amplified the productivity of senior engineers and accelerated the growth of juniors, the job market became increasingly challenging for many. Orosz highlights a growing disconnect where companies struggled to hire solid talent, yet many job seekers found it difficult to even get a response. This was compounded by an aggressive push for returning to the office from major players like Amazon and Instagram, shrinking the pool of remote opportunities and increasing interview scrutiny to combat AI-fueled cheating.
The podcast also broadened its reach, offering rare insights into the engineering cultures at Netflix and Google, and featuring foundational figures like Martin Fowler and Steve McConnell. These conversations underscore a key theme: as AI handles more of the "how," the durable, human skills of design, philosophy, and judgment—as discussed with John Ousterhout—become more critical than ever. The year's trends suggest that the most effective engineers and teams will be those who master the art of leveraging AI not as a replacement for skill, but as a powerful amplifier for sound architectural decisions.
Key takeaways:
- AI dominated 2025, with tools like Claude Code and Cursor popularizing agent-based coding and the MCP protocol gaining wide adoption.
- The job market was difficult, with companies struggling to hire while many engineers struggled to find roles, and RTO mandates accelerated.
- AI-fueled cheating in interviews led to increased scrutiny and a shift in how candidates are evaluated.
- The most popular content focused on real-world AI engineering, the state of the job market, and deep dives into the engineering cultures of major tech companies.