In 2017, Andrej Karpathy argued that neural networks would replace explicit logic as the dominant programming paradigm. Nine years later, that prediction has fully landed. The implications for how we build software are bigger than most engineers want to acknowledge.

The prediction was: bigger models win. The reality was: DeepSeek R1 rewrote the rules in January and nothing was the same after that. What 2025 taught us about reasoning, inference-time compute, and the economics of intelligence.