The assumptions we built engineering teams on no longer hold. Here's what shifted — and what it means.
If these assumptions no longer hold —
why should our teams and processes stay the same?
LLM coding agents hit a level of coherence that changed everything. Not gradually — in weeks. Engineers who adopted went from 80% manual to 80% agent-assisted coding almost overnight.
"LLM agent capabilities crossed some kind of threshold of coherence around December 2025 and caused a phase shift in software engineering... The intelligence part suddenly feels quite a bit ahead of all the rest of it — integrations, tools, knowledge, organizational workflows, processes."— Andrej Karpathy
Most teams are still running the old playbook. It made sense when the assumptions held. It doesn't anymore.
And the dirty secret? Most feature requests never make it through. They die in the backlog.
"I built Nexus — a production-ready system with authentication, semantic search, webhook integrations, comprehensive test coverage — in four days. Nearly 13,000 lines of code. While doing my day job as CTO."— Obie Fernandez
| Person | 2025 Commits | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Tobi Lutke | 800 | CEO of Shopify ($100B+) |
| Jack Dorsey | 757 | Founder of Twitter & Block |
"People I know are coding again, having mostly stopped as they moved into management. AI assistance means you can get something useful done in half an hour."— Simon Willison, co-creator of Django
The 12-Factor Process is the infrastructure playbook that makes this possible.
See the 12 Factors →