The 2025 Engineering Reality Check: Why 'Boring' is the New Brave

Source: Dev.to

If 2023 was the year of “AI Panic” and 2024 was the year of “AI Experimentation,” 2025 has cemented itself as the year of “Complexity Fatigue.”
As we settle into the latter half of the decade, the gap between shipping software and engineering software has never been wider. We are drowning in tools that promise to save us time while simultaneously demanding we learn three new meta‑frameworks just to render a “Hello World.”

I’ve spent the last few weeks auditing the current state of our industry—from the “vibe coding” trend to the React Server Components (RSC) security fallout. My conclusion? We need to stop chasing the “Next Big Thing” and start respecting the “Last Working Thing.”

Vibe Coding

The hype

“I built a SaaS in 4 hours using Cursor and Claude 3.7 without writing a line of code!”

Engineering principle

• Code is a liability, not an asset.

The risk

• Massive spike in “it works on my machine” fragility.
• AI excels at syntactic correctness (the code runs) but struggles with systemic integrity (security, state management, edge cases).

Senior take

• Use AI as a force multiplier, not a replacement.
• If you can’t explain why the code works, you’re a prompt operator waiting for the first CVE to take you down.

React Server Components (RSC)

The hype

“Just mark it use server and access your database directly! It’s so simple!”

Engineering principle

• Separation of concerns exists for a reason.

Reality

• CVE‑2025‑55182 (the “React2Shell” vulnerability) showed why blurring the line between client and server is dangerous.
• Teams spend more time debugging “serialization boundaries” and “waterfall requests” than they saved on bundle size.

Senior take

• Unless you are Facebook or Vercel, a well‑structured REST or GraphQL API is often safer, easier to debug, and more performant than a tangled web of server actions.

Microservices → Modular Monoliths

The hype

“You need independent scalability! Every function should be its own deploy!”

Engineering principle

• Locality is king.

Trend

• A massive “Return to Monolith” movement is underway. Companies like Amazon Prime Video and Segment have cut costs by ~90 % by moving back to monoliths.

Senior take

• Build a Modular Monolith: keep code separated by domain (e.g., Billing, Auth, Inventory) inside a single repository.
• You get the organization of microservices with the simplicity of a single deployment.

TypeScript Fatigue

The hype

“If it’s not typed, it’s unsafe.”

Engineering principle

• Use the right tool for the job.

Reality

• tsconfig, build, dist, and source‑map hell create real friction.
• The “JSDoc” movement (typing via comments) is gaining ground for libraries and smaller projects, offering ~90 % of the safety with 0 % of the compilation step.

Senior take

• Don’t be a dogmatist. TypeScript is great, but don’t let tooling become your job.
• If package.json has more devDependencies than dependencies, you might be over‑engineering.

The Most Valuable Senior Skill in 2025

Say “No.”

• No to adding complexity just because it’s trendy.
• No to abstracting code that hasn’t been duplicated yet.
• No to tools that solve problems you don’t have.

We get paid to solve business problems, not to play with shiny new toys. Let’s get back to building boring, reliable, fast software.