The December 2025 Inflection¶
mikhail-parakhin shared internal shopify telemetry showing daily-active AI tool usage approaching 100% of engineers, with a visible phase transition in December 2025. Before December, 2025 adoption grew "~50%" total for the year (already exponential, just slow). After December, the curve steepens sharply.
His claim: small model improvements compounded across tools until a threshold was crossed where models became good enough that using them stopped being optional. Secondary signal in the same data: CLI-based agents (Claude Code, Codex, etc. — tools where you don't have to look at the code line-by-line) became disproportionately popular after the inflection, consistent with engineer-as-director-of-agents and coding-agent-as-foundation.
Why it matters¶
The inflection is the empirical counterpart to Karpathy's animals-vs-ghosts framing and the scaling-law-plural story in scaling-laws-plural: no single benchmark jump, just the accumulation crossing a usefulness threshold. It is also what makes Shopify's stack bets (auto-research, SimGym, Liquid) time-relevant — you can't build company-wide agent infra without company-wide usage.