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More developers than ever before are using AI tools to both assist and generate code.
While enterprise AI adoption accelerates, new data from Stack Overflow’s 2025 Developer Survey exposes a critical blind spot: the mounting technical debt created by AI tools that generate “almost right” solutions, potentially undermining the productivity gains they promise to deliver.
Stack Overflow’s annual developer survey is one of the largest such reports in any given year. In 2024 the report found that developers were not worried that AI would still their jobs. Somewhat ironically, Stack Overflow was initially negatively impacted by the growth of gen AI, with declining traffic and resulting layoffs in 2023.
The 2025 survey of over 49,000 developers across 177 countries reveals a troubling paradox in enterprise AI adoption. AI usage continues climbing—84% of developers now use or plan to use AI tools, up from 76% in 2024. Yet trust in these tools has cratered.
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“One of the most surprising findings was a significant shift in developer preferences for AI compared to previous years, while most developers use AI, they like it less and trust it less this year,” Erin Yepis, Senior Analyst for Market Research and Insights at Stack Overflow, told VentureBeat. “This response is surprising because with all of the investment in and focus on AI in tech news, I would expect that the trust would grow as the technology gets better.”
The numbers tell the story. Only 33% of developers trust AI accuracy in 2025, down from 43% in 2024 and 42% in 2023. AI favorability dropped from 77% in 2023 to 72% in 2024 to just 60% this year.
But the survey data reveals a more urgent concern for technical decision-makers. Developers cite “AI solutions that are almost right, but not quite” as their top frustration—66% report this problem. Meanwhile, 45% say debugging AI-generated code takes more time than expected. AI tools promise productivity gains but may actually create new categories of technical debt.
The ‘almost right’ phenomenon disrupts developer workflows
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