Articles about AI dominated media coverage in 2025, as the ability to perform more than just rudimentary tasks grew into making software development life cycle processes autonomous. The widespread piloting and implementation of generative AI, agents and MCP servers were among the topics that produced the top trending articles on sdtimes.com this year. But AI wasn’t the only thing on the minds of developers and their managers. Here’s a look at the top trending stories on sdtimes.com for 2025.
The most-viewed article this year asked the question: “Is Agile Dead in the Age of AI?” Author Adam Sandman, CEO of Inflectra, posited that Agile processes are in fact not dead, but are evolving. “The future of software development isn’t Agile vs. AI, it’s Agile with AI. Strategic alignment, mentorship, and smart governance make sure that AI’s power enhances safety, maintainability, and long-term product value.,” he wrote.
No. 2: 88% of companies are contemplating leaving Oracle Java
SD Times editor Jenna Barron dug into a January report by Java platform provider Azul Systems that showed Oracle changed its licensing model to base the cost on the number of employees an organization has, instead of charging by the Java instance in use. “Since then,” Barron wrote, “organizations have been contemplating alternatives, and 72% of respondents were already thinking about it when surveyed in 2023.”
The report shows that the top five reasons for wanting to move on from Oracle include cost (42%), preference for open-source (40%), Oracle’s sales tactics (37%), uncertainty around changing licenses and pricing (36%), and restrictive Oracle policies (33%).
No. 3: AI coding productivity gains cancelled out by other friction points that slow developers down
“AI adoption is saving developers a significant amount of time, but several friction points still exist throughout the software development life cycle that developers are still losing time to,” Barron wrote from August studies of developer experience and engineering management.
Atlassian’s 2025 State of Developer Experience report showed, “So we’re right back where we started, with developers saving 10 hours a week using AI and losing 10 hours a week to inefficiencies. Improving the developer experience requires a systematic approach to understanding and resolving developer friction points.”
No. 4: AI won’t replace developers, but it will leave some behind
Dan Faulkner, CEO of Smart Bear, wrote: When execs ask, “How many developers can we cut if we embrace AI?”— They’re asking the wrong question.
The right question is: How do we evolve our entire software lifecycle to match the velocity AI makes possible without breaking trust or burning down quality?
“The future doesn’t belong to teams that write the most code. It belongs to those who deliver the most resilient, trustworthy, and scalable software,” he wrote. “That future needs development teams. But it needs a different mindset and a different kind of leadership.”
No. 5: Why AI agents need a protocol like MCP to reach their potential
MCP can do for AI agents what USB does for computers, Lin Sun, senior director of open source at cloud native connectivity company Solo.io, explained.
For instance, a computer needs a way to connect to peripherals like a mouse, keyboard, or external storage, and USB is a standard that provides that connectivity. Similarly, MCP allows AI agents to connect to different tools and data sources, like Google Calendar. It provides “a standard way to declare the tools so the tools can be easily discovered and can be easily reused by different AI applications,” she said.
No. 6: Google goes all in on agent development, Gemini at Google Cloud Next 25
At its Google Cloud Next 25 event in April, Google announced a number of new announcements, mainly related to enhancing Gemini offerings and making it easier to build and adopt agents.
Among the announcements were the release of ADK, Google’s Agent Development Kit; an Agentspace platform on which developers can build agents combining Gemini models, Google-quality search functionality, and enterprise data; and introduced Google Workspace Flows, enabling users to create agentic workflows to streamline processes and automate repetitive tasks across Workspace.
No. 7: Containers in 2025: Bridging the gap between software and hardware
Containers have long been a popular way of packaging up and delivering software, but many developers have also begun to explore using containers in more ways than originally intended.
In a recent episode of the SD Times podcast, What the Dev, Scott McCarty, senior principal product manager for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, sat down with us to discuss the trends he’s been seeing and also make predictions for what’s to come.
No. 8: tRPC vs GraphQL vs REST: Choosing the right API design for modern web applications
Software engineer Kacper Mihalik contributed this guide to SD Times comparing these technologies from a practical engineering standpoint, after several years of building production systems with React and TypeScript.
“I’ve shipped REST, GraphQL, and tRPC APIs,” he wrote. “Each option presents distinct strengths, with real-world tradeoffs developers and engineering leaders should understand. … focusing on architecture, type safety, toolchains, and developer experience.
No. 9: The future of AI isn’t chat: Why user experience will make or break the next wave of applications
ChatGPT captured the world’s imagination, but it may have also trapped it. The chatbot interface—with its familiar conversational format—made AI accessible to millions, demonstrating the remarkable capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in a package that felt natural and inviting. Yet this very success has created a misconception: that AI equals chatbots, and that every application needs a chat window to be AI-powered.
Peter Day, a general partner at super{set} – a startup studio where great data+AI ideas become transformational software companies – wrote: “The future of AI isn’t about chat windows. It is about invisible intelligence woven seamlessly into how people work, making complex tasks simpler and tedious work disappear. That future requires rethinking user experience from the ground up, not retrofitting chatbots onto existing products. The winners will be those who recognize this distinction and design accordingly.”
No. 10: OWASP Top 10 updated after four years, with many of the same concerns still impacting applications
As SD Times editor Barron reported in November, this year’s updated list features many of the same concerns from the 2021 versions, with a few notable changes, such as Server-Side Request Forgery, which was in last place in 2021, being rolled into the Broken Access Control category.
“Additionally, a new category, Software Supply Chain Failures, was added and includes Vulnerable and Outdated Components (#6 in 2021), and Mishandling of Exceptional Conditions made the list for the first time, containing CWEs related to improper error handling, logical errors, failing open, and other related scenarios,” Barron wrote.
Read our top news of the year here.
