An increasing number of builders are adopting AI, however the belief they’ve in its outputs is getting worse and worse over time.
That is in accordance with Stack Overflow’s 2025 Developer Survey, which gathered responses from 49,000 builders throughout 177 international locations.
This 12 months, 84% of respondents say they’re utilizing or plan to make use of AI instruments for growth (up from 76% final 12 months), however 46% say they don’t belief the output of these AI instruments (up from 31% final 12 months).
Extra particularly, 75.3% stated they don’t belief AI-generated solutions, 61.7% had moral or safety issues about AI-generated code, and 61.3% stated they need to have the ability to absolutely perceive their code.
“The rising lack of belief in AI instruments stood out to us as the important thing information level on this 12 months’s survey, particularly given the elevated tempo of development and adoption of those AI instruments. AI is a robust software, but it surely has vital dangers of misinformation or can lack complexity or relevance,” stated Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of Stack Overflow.
The survey discovered that for 45% of respondents, debugging AI-generation code is time consuming, which is likely one of the key frustrations with coping with AI-generated code.
Stack Overflow additionally discovered that solely 31% of respondents are at present utilizing AI brokers, and of these, 69% stated they’ve seen a rise in productiveness. Seventeen % are planning to make use of them sooner or later, whereas 38% don’t plan to ever use them.
Moreover, 64% of builders don’t understand AI as a menace to their jobs, a slight lower from final 12 months (68%).
The report additionally discovered that 69% of builders have hung out studying new coding methods or languages up to now 12 months, and 44% used AI instruments for studying (up from 37%) final 12 months.
Lastly, whereas builders are utilizing AI to help with their work, a majority (77%) aren’t partaking in vibe coding for his or her skilled work.
Different fascinating findings from the survey are:
- 24% of builders are completely happy at their present job—a slight enhance from final 12 months’s 20%, doubtless associated to pay raises
- 32% of builders work remotely and 45% of US builders work remotely
- GitHub surpassed Jira as essentially the most fascinating collaboration software
For extra insights, the total survey findings can be found right here.