yeah I guess base models without built-it CoT are not going away, exactly because you might want to tune it yourself. If DSPy (or similar) evolves to allow the same or similar than OpenAI did with o1, that will be quite powerful, but we still need the big foundational models powering it all
on the other hand, if cementing techniques in the models becomes a trend, we might see various models around with each technique for us to pick and choose beyond CoT without need for us to guide the model ourselves, then what's left for us to optimize is the prompts on what we want, and the routing the combination of those in a nice pipeline
still the principle of DSPy stays the same, have a dataset to evaluate, let the machine trial an error prompts, hyperparameters and so on, just switch around different techniques (possibly automating that too), and get measurable, optimizable results
This will make it harder for things like DSPy to work, which rely using "good" CoT examples as few-shot examples.