Stack Overflow’s 2026 Developer Survey Reveals Positive Sentiment Towards AI — but Trust Remains Conditional

NEW YORK, NY — October 6, 2026. Today Stack Overflow published the results of its Annual Developer Survey, its flagship report of the state of software development. Now in its sixteenth year, Stack Overflow received over 30,000 responses from technologists worldwide, representing 169 countries across 103 questions, and focused on 467 different technologies. The survey also includes a new section covering

knowledge, trust, and context in developer workflows. The Developer Survey provides a critical snapshot into the current state of the global developer community, focusing on the tools and technologies they use or want to learn more about.

AI adoption holds steady while trust shifts from skepticism to conditional acceptance

Previously, Stack Overflow’s Developer Survey indicated a trust gap, with AI usage rising three years in row, with trust in its output falling. However, the picture this year’s data set paints is a much more nuanced one: adoption has now reached a near saturation point, but developers appear to have adapted. Nearly half of respondents trust AI when they can verify its work, however only a very small percentage of them (6.6%) are prepared to trust it when it comes to important decisions, and a majority of developers (78.7%) say that source attribution is important or very important when evaluating an AI-generated code or technical answer.

“Developers are historically a highly skeptical group, and over the last year, as AI agents become rapidly more autonomous, that skepticism now acts as a critical safeguard,” said Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of Stack Overflow. “As agents take on more work, developers need to know where an answer came from, what context informed the information that was produced or a decision that was made, and the most crucial piece—that they can actually verify its accuracy and relevance. Trust is not a given when it comes to developers; it is earned through transparency, source attribution, and rich technical context.”

Key findings in the 2026 survey covering the topic AI include:

• AI is used by most developers at work. Coding assistants or coding agents are used by 66% of respondents, general-purpose chat tools by 63%, and automated agent workflows by 26.2%. Only 17.2% say they do not use AI tools.
• A great deal of caution is being exercised when selecting and using AI tools. Developers switching to new AI tools are doing it largely because the output is better (25%) or because their organization required it (11%).
• Power users spend substantial time with AI. Among daily AI users, 31%use it for four or more hours per day. Altogether, 80% of this daily-user group use AI for at least one hour a day.
• AI’s utility is higher closer to the code. 74% respondents find AI useful or very useful for implementation and66% say AI is useful for debugging or refactoring code. However when it comes to more human-oriented tasks such as team communication or design, the level of usefulness falls precipitously to around a third of respondents (45% and 50% respectively).
• Organizational governance for AI trails its adoption level.30% of developers surveyed say AI use at work is optional and left up to the individual, while only 24% say their organization publishes approved tools or an official AI policy or guidance.
• Some developers remain wary of AI’s broader consequences. While four in ten developers make no effort to avoid AI tools, fears of skill atrophy or self-replacement (17%) and ethical concerns (15%) are the main reasons driving resistance among detractors.

Developers are navigating an increasingly complex workplace — but the drive to learn is strong

The reality of the workplace for the average developer has never been more complicated or in flux. Shaped by dynamics including rapidly shifting expectations, flexible work arrangements, lack of clarity in organizational priorities, and a cooling labor market, many individuals are either complacent in their current roles or have struck out on their own for employment. However, the desire to learn new technologies as part of or outside of work remains, with over half of our respondents (52%) acquiring a new coding skill or learning a new programming language this year. Among these learners, 58.9% turned to technical documentation, 52.7% used AI code-generation tools, 51.7% sought out other online resources, and 33.8% visited Stack Overflow.

Top insights from the 2026 survey on developers in the workplace and learning habits include:

• Over 45% of developers say they are complacent in their current jobs, and one third of them say they are unhappy. A total of 45% are classified as complacent, versus 33% not happy and 22% happy. For those who identified as complacent, burnout or tech fatigue was the leading cause (21%),
• Solo employment more than doubled. Freelancers and sole proprietors account for 11% of respondents, up from 4% in 2025.
• Remote work remains the most popular work arrangement. Despite widespread return to office mandates, remote employees account for 35% of the dataset, compared with 20% in hybrid arrangements that lean in-person, followed by 18% who work fully in-person.
• Ambiguity creates the most friction. Unclear priorities is the leading factor respondents list as a reason for friction, with the level of difficulty at 17%, followed by inefficient workflows at 15% and insufficient time or resources at 14%.
• Dependability is top of the list when it comes to technology that developers will recommend. Reliability, performance, and stability lead the reasons for endorsing a specific technology at 17%, ahead of productivity or time savings (16%) and community or ecosystem strength (13%). AI features rank much lower at 2%.
• Search and AI are the top two sources for initial attempts at technical problem-solving. Online search is selected by 83% of users and an AI agent selected by 70% when it comes to initially tackling problems, followed by maintained repositories (44%) and directly contacting a trusted person (29%).
• Stack Overflow remains a leading community. Public GitHub projects lead narrowly at 69.5%, followed by Stack Overflow at 68.6%, YouTube at 58%, and Reddit at 54%.

Developers rely on familiar foundations as AI impacts how they build and select technology

This year, more than 30,000 developers weighed in across 169 countries, with the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, India, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Poland, Australia, and Ukraine representing the top ten countries. We also explored topics beyond artificial intelligence, work, and the broader developer community, polling users on their preferred programming languages, cloud platforms, work tools, databases, and other key technologies:

• The familiar web stack still dominates. For the twelfth year in a row, JavaScript leads at 62%, followed by SQL at 58.4%, HTML and CSS at 58.3%, and Python at 58.1%.
• AI concentrates in Python and JavaScript. A total of 39% report using Python with AI tools and 38% are using JavaScript, ahead of HTML and CSS at 33% and SQL at 30%.
• PostgreSQL remains the database leader. PostgreSQL was used by 58% in the past year, compared with 42% for SQLite and 35% for MySQL.
• Building software in house is common and over half of those building with AI do so to replace paid vendors. For those that indicate they are building software in-house with AI, most create custom team tools to streamline efficiency: 74% of respondents built small scripts or automations, 66% work on team-level internal tools, and 54% of those surveyed created customer-facing products. 19% of those building software in-house are doing so to replace vendors, and over half of respondents (54%) are using AI assistance to do so.
• Current LLM usage and preference for future use is split. Anthropic and OpenAI are neck and neck for the highest usage at 75% and 74% respectively. However, when it comes to LLMs developers are eager to use in the coming year, 49.0% want to work with Anthropic LLMs versus 32% OpenAI LLMs; agent usage similarly favors Anthropic, 45% to 32%.

To read the full results from Stack Overflow’s Annual Developer Survey, please visit: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2026/

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 Internal, helps more than 15,000 organizations distribute knowledge, increase efficiency, and innovate faster.