AI at Work, 2025: Developers Use It More and Trust It Less
Murad · Published 2026-10-25 · Version 5
Two Stack Overflow Developer Surveys — 114,628 answers — read as one dataset
The headline
Figure: Developers, 2024 and 2025
Figure: Developers who answered in 2025
Figure: Developers who answered in 2024
Figure: Countries, 2025
Stack Overflow asks developers the same questions about AI every year. Put the two latest years of raw answers side by side and the change is sharp: more developers use AI, and fewer believe what it tells them.
Figure: 2024 → 2025, at a glance
More use, less trust
Figure: Developers use AI more, and trust it less
Usage rose by 17 points in a year — from 62% of developers to 78%. Trust went the other way: 43% trusted the accuracy of AI output in 2024, 33% in 2025. Distrust climbed from 30% to 46%.
In 2024, 1.4 developers trusted AI’s accuracy for every one who distrusted it. In 2025 it reversed: 1.4 distrust it for every one who trusts it.
Fewer feel good about it — but few feel threatened
Figure: Fewer developers feel favorable about AI at work
Favorable views of AI at work fell from 72% to 60%. Yet the share who see it as a threat to their own job barely moved — 12% to 15%. Developers are not afraid of AI; they are less impressed by it.
Who uses AI every day
Figure: Daily AI use and trust, by role (2025)
AI/ML engineers lead: 74% use AI every day, and they trust it most, at 49%. Founders (65%) and front-end developers (60%) follow. At the other end sit the people closest to hardware and systems — embedded developers (29%), game and graphics developers (27%) and system administrators (26%).
The longer the career, the less daily use
Figure: Daily AI use and trust, by years of experience (2025)
About half of developers in their first ten years use AI every day (51–54%). The share drops to 44% at 20 years and 40% at 30. Trust barely moves with experience: about a third at every stage, from 35% in the first year to 32% at thirty.
Agents are still early
Figure: Do developers use AI agents at work? (2025)
Agents — AI that carries out tasks on its own, not just suggests code — are where the industry’s attention is. Developers are not there yet: 31% use them at all (14% daily), 14% use AI only as autocomplete, 17% plan to start, and 38% have no plans.
“Almost right, but not quite”
Figure: What frustrates developers about AI tools (2025)
Two in three developers (66%) name the same problem: AI answers that are almost right, but not quite. Close behind, 45% say debugging AI-generated code takes longer. One in five (20%) say they have become less confident in their own problem-solving.
“Almost right” is the expensive kind of wrong: it passes a glance and fails later. It is also the likeliest reason trust fell while use rose.
The models developers use
Figure: AI models developers used in the past year (2025)
OpenAI’s GPT models are near-universal, used by 83% of those who answered. Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet is second at 43%, ahead of Google’s Gemini Flash (36%). DeepSeek’s reasoning models reached 24% within a year of release.
Where daily use is highest
Figure: Developers who use AI every day, by country (2025)
Daily use is highest in Ukraine (61%), India (60%) and Brazil (54%) — well ahead of the United States (40%), Germany (41%), France (37%) and the United Kingdom (36%).
Do daily AI users earn more?
Figure: Median yearly pay, by AI use (2025, professional developers)
In four of the five countries with the most answers, developers who use AI every day report higher median pay: $160,000 against $140,000 in the United States, $99,383 against $88,492 in the United Kingdom, $87,011 against $77,730 in Germany and $69,609 against $59,645 in France. In India the two are about the same ($19,761 and $19,180).
This is a comparison, not a cause. Developers who use AI daily differ in more than their AI use — role, seniority, company — and the survey cannot separate them.
Where developers keep AI out
Figure: Where developers keep AI out (2025)
The closer a task is to production, the more developers keep AI out of it: 65% for deployment and monitoring, 59% for project planning, and 50% for committing and reviewing code. Where a wrong answer is cheap, the door is open: only 24% keep it out of writing code, and 16% out of searching for answers.
Figure: Where developers already use AI (2025)
The mirror image: 59% already use AI to search for answers and 47% to write code, but only 20% to commit and review code, and 10% for deployment and monitoring.
Figure: When developers still ask a person (2025)
Asked when they would still turn to a person, 75% said: when they don’t trust AI’s answers. 62% would for ethical or security concerns about code, and only 4% think they won’t need help from people anymore.
These charts show where developers use AI, not how much they trust it there: the survey asks about trust once, overall. The people who hand a task to AI are also self-selected, so a task being handed over doesn’t make it safe. Thanks to a reader on Reddit who asked for this split.
What 2026 says so far
Stack Overflow’s 2026 survey
Stack Overflow’s 2026 survey (30,903 answers) has published its summary but not yet its raw data. It describes trust as conditional: 48% trust AI output only when they can easily verify it. When the 2026 answers are released, this report will add them as a third year.
How this was made
This report was built in Varan from the raw answer files of the 2024 and 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Surveys, opened as two CSV files and queried as one. Every chart is computed from those answers; nothing was sampled. A share is the number who said yes divided by the number who answered that question:
\text{share} = \frac{\text{developers who answered yes}}{\text{developers who answered}}
Unanswered questions are left out. “Uses AI” is any “Yes” — the question changed between the years, and only 2025 asked how often. Roles and countries with fewer than 300 answers are not shown. Pay is the survey’s own yearly figure in US dollars, for professional developers between $1,000 and $1,000,000.
Data and licence
Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2024 and 2025
Open Database License (ODbL 1.0)
Contains information from the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2024 and 2025, made available under the Open Database License (ODbL 1.0). Source: survey.stackoverflow.co