This year’s changes in software, as seen through buzzwords

In IT, if there isn’t a new buzzword, did anything big even happen?

Software pros likely learned some new terms in 2025 as they integrated AI into their development practices. Here are some of the year’s memorable software expressions—ones defining advancements in tools and strategies that we’ll likely still be using in 2026.

MCP

Where you first heard it: Introduced by AI company Anthropic on Nov. 25, 2024, the open “Model Context Protocol” allows large language models to connect with disparate data sources: maybe a repository, a business tool, or development environment.

For users who want to integrate large language models with data sets, MCP doesn’t necessarily require deep expertise in platforms holding that data—say, GitHub or a server in Google Cloud. “I don’t have to know what the endpoint is. I can just [tell] it, ‘I want this data,’ and it knows the endpoint to use to go get it. And that’s game-changing, because now my models can talk to my systems,” James Norman, managing partner and co-founder of VC firm Black Ops VC, told us.

Stat: The MCP software development kit, as of Nov. 24, 2025, had over 56 million PyPI downloads in the last month.

Vibe coding

Where you first heard it: Andrej Karpathy, a former senior director of AI at Tesla, coined the term in an X post on Feb. 2, 2025, writing, “There’s a new kind of coding I call ‘vibe coding,’ where you fully give in to the vibes…and forget that the code even exists.” The approach—using natural-language prompts to build apps—has its benefits (speed!) and drawbacks (speed!).

“I don’t really want a doctor doing vibe surgery,” James Stanger, chief technology evangelist at CompTIA, told IT Brew.

Stat: A recent global survey from StackOverflow, polling over 49,000 respondents, revealed that 72% of developers are not vibe coding as part of their professional development work.

Agent

Where you first heard it: Though the term has been around for decades to describe software, and since the ’90s to describe Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible, you’ve likely heard the term a lot more this year. At Davos 2025 in January, OpenAI Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil said AI tools like ChatGPT were “on the verge” of moving from simply answering your questions to “doing things for you in the real world.” (Spoiler alert: It happened.) Many vendors, like Oracle, ServiceNow, and Salesforce, now offer agentic capabilities.

Stat: A global survey of 1,500 executives, conducted by Capgemini Research Institute and released in July 2025, found that 14% of organizations have implemented AI agents, and almost one-quarter (23%) have launched pilots

[The name of that flashy code-developer tool that just came out.]

Where you first heard it: Integrated development environments (IDEs) like Visual Studio Code aren’t the only options for software pros today. Now there are “IDEs on steroids,” according to Emilio Salvador, VP of strategy and developer relations at GitLab, citing recent offerings from AI-powered code editor Cursor, Replit, the open-source Continue.dev, and Google’s recently released agentic Antigravity development platform.

These tools, he said, offer capabilities “beyond coding,” like supporting natural-language commands and autonomous app creation. “Developers have always been amazing at experimenting and trying new things. And now this is like Disneyland,” Salvador told us.

Stat: This year’s StackOverflow study found that 84% of respondents are “using or planning to use AI tools in their development process,” an increase from 76% last year.