Software engineering with LLMs in 2025: temperature check
How are devs using AI tools at Big Tech and startups, and what do they actually think of them? This was the topic of my annual conference talk, in June 2025, in London, at LDX3 by LeadDev.
To research, I talked with devs at:
- AI dev tools startups:Anthropic, Cursor, Windsurf
- Big Tech: Google and Amazon
- AI startups: incident.io and a biotech AI startup
- Vendor-independent software engineers: Kent Beck, Birgitta Boeckeler, Simon Willison, Armin Ronacher and Peter Steinberger,
The recording of the talk is out – if you were not at the conference but have 25 minutes, you can watch it here
And if you don’t: I wrote an article that summarizes the talk and adds more details: read it here.
My takeaway is that these tools are spreading; they will probably change how us, engineers, build software; but we still don’t know exactly how. Now is the time to experiment – both with an open, but also a critical mindset!
