State of AI: The 2025 Developer Survey by Stack Overflow
Update: 2025-08-04
Description
Join us as we dive deep into the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, the definitive report on the state of software development. With over 49,000+ responses from 177 countries, this annual survey provides a crucial snapshot into the needs, tools, and technologies shaping the global developer community.
In this episode, we'll explore:
The Evolving AI Landscape:
- Discover how developers are exploring new AI agent tools, Large Language Models (LLMs), and community platforms.
- While a majority of developers (52%) either don't use AI agents or stick to simpler AI tools, and 38% have no plans to adopt them, an impressive 84% of respondents are using or planning to use AI tools in their development process, an increase from last year.
- Learn about the shifts in sentiment: positive sentiment for AI tools has decreased in 2025 to just 60% (from over 70% in 2023 and 2024).
- Crucially, more developers actively distrust the accuracy of AI tools (46%) than trust it (33%), with only a fraction (3%) reporting "highly trusting" the output.
- Understand the biggest frustrations, cited by 66% of developers, which is dealing with "AI solutions that are almost right, but not quite", often leading to the second-biggest frustration: "Debugging AI-generated code is more time-consuming" (45%).
- Despite these challenges, we'll highlight that approximately 70% of AI agent users agree that agents have reduced the time spent on specific development tasks, and 69% agree they have increased productivity.
- Many respondents (over 36%) have also learned how to use AI-enabled tools for their job or to advance their career in the last year.
- Furthermore, find out why Stack Overflow is becoming a new resource for developers who need to solve AI-related issues, with about 35% of visits being a result of such problems.
Top Technologies & Developer Preferences:
- Unpack why Cargo, Rust's build tool and package manager, is the most admired (71%) cloud development and infrastructure tool this year.
- Discover uv, a Python package manager built in Rust, as the most admired (74%) Stack Overflow tag technology.
- Explore the continued dominance of OpenAI's GPT models, with 82% of developers indicating they used them for development work in the past year, and why Anthropic's Claude Sonnet is the most admired LLM this year.
- Understand the significant acceleration of Python's adoption, with a 7 percentage point increase from 2024 to 2025, solidifying its role as the go-to language for AI, data science, and back-end development.
- Learn why Visual Studio Code (75.9%) and Visual Studio (29%) maintained their top spots for developer environments for the fourth year.
- See how GitHub has stepped up as a more desired collaboration tool than Jira this year.
- Delve into the top three reasons developers turn their back on a technology: security or privacy concerns, prohibitive pricing, and the availability of better alternatives.
Developer Profiles & Work Environments:
- Gain insights into the global developer community, with the United States of America (20.4%), Germany (8.6%), and India (7.2%) as the top countries responding to this year's survey.
- We'll cover work preferences, with nearly one third of developers (32.4%) working remotely this year, and the US having the highest number of remote developers (45%) among top-reporting countries.
- Understand that most developers (65%) have been coding for 10 or more years.
- significantly higher interest in more social and interactive content formats like "Chat (people)" and "Coding challenges," aligning with a motivation to skill up. And note that Stack Overflow remains a frequent destination, with 82% visiting at least a few times per month. Learners also use YouTube for community more than professional developers.
Tune in to gain a deeper understanding of the forces shaping the world of software development!
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