Stack Overflow’s 2025 Developer Survey Reveals Trust in AI at an All Time Low

New York City– July 29, 2025 – Stack Overflow today announced the results of its 2025 Developer Survey, its definitive report on the state of software development. In its fifteenth year, Stack Overflow received over 49,000 responses from 177 countries across 62 questions focused on 314 different technologies; including new focus on AI agent tools, LLMs and community platforms. This annual Developer Survey provides a crucial snapshot into the needs of the global developer community, focusing on the tools and technologies they use or want to learn more about.

The Widening AI Trust Gap

For the third year in a row, our survey demonstrated an increase in the number of developers using AI tools year over year, with 84% saying they use or plan to use AI tools in their development process, up from 76% in 2024. However, 46% of developers said they don't trust the accuracy of the output from AI tools, a significant increase from 31% last year.This year’s Developer Survey includes an expanded section dedicated to the growing landscape of artificial intelligence, with 15 new questions to glean insights on top usage and utility questions for AI-enabled technology and AI agent tools, AI's impact on how developers work, and whether developers have engaged in "vibe coding" in the last year.

“The growing lack of trust in AI tools stood out to us as the key data point in this year's survey, especially given the increased pace of growth and adoption of these AI tools. AI is a powerful tool, but it has significant risks of misinformation or can lack complexity or relevance,” said Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of Stack Overflow. “With the use of AI now ubiquitous and ‘AI slop’ rapidly replacing the content we see online, an approach that leans heavily on trustworthy, responsible use of data from curated knowledge bases is critical. By providing a trusted human intelligence layer in the age of AI, we believe the tech enthusiasts of today can play a larger role in adding value to build the AI technologies and products of tomorrow.”

Other findings in the 2025 survey regarding AI and Machine Learning include:

  • A key frustration from 45% of respondents was that debugging AI-generated code is time-consuming, despite often repeated claims that coding can be handled solely by AI tools.
  • If AI can do most coding tasks in the future, developers told us why they would still want to ask another person for help:
    • Three quarters (75.3%) of users said they don't trust AI answers, 61.7% said they have ethical or security concerns about code, and 61.3% said they want to fully understand their code.
  • AI agents are not being used by the majority of developers, with only 31% using them currently, 17% planning to, and 38% of respondents not planning to use AI agents. However, for those developers who have used AI agents at work, 69% agree they have experienced an increase in productivity.
  • Despite headlines that imply otherwise, the majority of developers (64%) still do not perceive AI as a threat to their jobs. However, this is a slight decrease from 68% in 2024.
  • Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio still rank as the top IDEs used by developers; however, usage is growing for new AI-enabled IDEs added this year including Cursor (18%), Claude Code (10%), and Windsurf (5%).
  • LLM models used by most developers are OpenAI’s GPT models (81%), Claude Sonnet models (43%), and Gemini Flash models (35%).

The Need to Unlock Growth and Power Learning

AI is democratizing access to software development in new and innovative ways, with 'vibe coding' emerging as the latest trend for less experienced developers. For the uninitiated, vibe coding makes it easy for anyone to get a head start on projects by describing what they want AI tools to accomplish. However, vibe coding requires a high level of trust in the AI’s output, and there are potential trade-offs in confidence and security for a faster turnaround and expanding capabilities to those who would not otherwise be able to code. This year, we asked developers if ‘vibe coding’, defined as the process of generating software from LLM prompts, was part of their professional development work. While developers said they are using AI tools and learning to code for AI, nearly 77% said vibe coding is not part of their professional development work.

The desire for human interaction and knowledge exchange remains strong within the developer community, with Stack Overflow (84%), GitHub (67%), and YouTube (61%) making the list of the top three community platforms developers used in the past year or plan to use. Additionally, 82% of respondents visit Stack Overflow at least multiple times per month if not multiple times per day, with 35% of respondents visiting Stack Overflow after encountering issues with AI responses.

The results this year also provide an updated view into how technologists engage in learning:

  • 69% of developers have spent time in the last year learning new coding techniques or a new programming language; 36% learned AI-enabled tools for their job or to advance their career.
  • 44% of developers are turning to AI tools to learn to code, up from last year (37%). Top resources for learning to code remain technical documentation (68%), online resources (59%) and Stack Overflow (51%) though all show lower usage this year compared to last. For those specifically learning to code for AI, 53% used AI tools.
  • Gen Z developers (ages 18-24) learning to code in the past year are more likely to engage with coding challenges than other age groups, with 15% using coding challenges compared to 12% overall.
  • Gen Z developers (ages 18-24) looking for relevant developer content are turning to coding challenges and human chat; 37% use chat and 39% use coding challenges compared to 27% using chat and 30% using coding challenges overall.

Reviewing the Ever Evolving Tech Landscape

With 62 questions in the 2025 Annual Developer Survey spanning 314 different technologies, we explored plenty of topics beyond artificial intelligence, polling our community on their preferred programming languages, cloud platforms, work tools, databases, and more:

  • More than 49,000 developers participated from across 177 countries, with the United States, Germany, India, United Kingdom, France, Canada, Ukraine, Poland, Netherlands, and Italy representing the top ten countries. Among the top ten responding countries, developers in India show the highest level of trust in AI tools, with a combined 56% either highly or somewhat trusting them, followed by developers in Ukraine at 41%. Other countries show more moderate trust levels, with Italy at 31%, the Netherlands and the United States of America at 28%, Poland at 26%, Canada and France at 25%, the United Kingdom at 23%, and Germany at 22%.
  • Python's adoption has accelerated significantly, with a +7 percentage point jump from 2024 to 2025. Top programming languages this year also include Javascript (66%), HTML/CSS (62%) and SQL (59%).
  • Docker has moved from a popular tool to a near-universal one. After years of growth, it experienced a +17 percentage point jump in usage from 2024 to 2025 (71%) among all cloud development and infrastructure technologies, followed by npm (57%) and AWS (43%).
  • PostgreSQL is ranked the highest among all database technologies for developers that want to use it in the next year (47%) or have used it this year and want to continue using it next year (66%) for the third year in a row.
  • GitHub is the most popular code documentation and collaboration tool (81%), followed by Jira (46%), and GitLab (36%).

To read the full results from Stack Overflow’s annual Developer Survey, visit: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/

About Stack Overflow

Across its public and private platforms, Stack Overflow empowers developer communities to discover the information, answers, and learning opportunities they need – when they need them. Millions of the world's developers and technologists visit Stack Overflow to ask questions, learn, and share technical knowledge, making it one of the most popular websites in the world. Stack Overflow’s market-leading knowledge-sharing and collaboration platform, Stack Overflow for Teams, helps more than 20,000 organizations distribute knowledge, increase efficiency, and innovate faster.