2025 Recap: Research → Plan → Implement

January 5, 2026

Working with engineering teams adopting AI tools, I see the same pattern: teams that succeed are not just using better tools. They are working differently.

Agents, skills, RAGs… in the end, they are all ways to improve the input and context we give AI. But the real breakthrough this year was not only technological. It was conceptual.

Successful teams moved from “do this for me” to “let’s figure out how to do this.”

Plan Mode in Claude or Cursor, tools like Spec Kit… they all turned the research and planning phase into the secret of solid execution. It is no longer just about generating code. It is about thinking through the problem together first.

And when you run these tools inside your repo, with access to your code and your previous commits, the change is radical. The generated code does not just work. It feels like you wrote it. It understands your patterns, your architecture, your previous decisions.

In the end, we are still feeding language models. But now we give them the right context, at the right time, in the right way.

The code we write is no longer just ours. It is a conversation. And that changes everything about how teams need to work.

The teams that get this right focus on the workflow, not just the tools. They adopt research → plan → implement as a practice. The rest follows.

Want to see how this works in practice? Start with understanding how Claude Code explores your codebase, then dive into the complete workflow that successful teams are using.