How are developers adopting API-First design in 2025?
I've been exploring the growing shift toward API-First development — where teams design, document, and agree on APIs before writing backend or frontend code.
This approach helps streamline collaboration between developers, reduce integration issues, and improve scalability — but I’ve noticed it’s still not universally adopted.
I recently wrote an article about this trend and some practical lessons for modern teams: API-First Development: An Introduction for Modern Developers
I’d love to hear how others are approaching API-First workflows in 2025:
Are you designing APIs before implementation?
Which tools or standards (like OpenAPI, Postman, or Stoplight) are helping your teams?
What challenges or trade-offs have you faced?
It's always the "it depends" kind of answer. In bigger companies, you have teams dedicated to API governance, whatever they say, it's how it's done. In early-stage startups, you have full-stack folks doing end-to-end design, test, integrate with UI, document, etc. The trickiest ones are the ones that are in between these two stages. It's where it gets messy, and you MUST have something in place to serve as an API contract. Swagger dominates that, imho, Postman collections and docs are used a bit differently in my experience.
I'm helping build https://voiden.md which serves as a unified place for API spec, test, and documentation, but there are also plenty of API tools that focus solely on endpoint execution.