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Programmers are using AI more than ever, but they don't like or trust the tools very much, according to the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey.
The survey of almost 50,000 developers found that 84% now use or plan to use AI tools in their workflow, up from last year (76%). Over half of professional developers (51%) use these tools daily.
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Such figures might suggest that programmers must love AI. However, only 60% expressed positive sentiment toward AI tools, a proportion down from over 70% in both 2023 and 2024.
Distrust is a defining theme of the survey. In 2024, 43% of developers felt good about AI accuracy, and only 31% were skeptical. By 2025, 33% of developers trusted AI tool outputs, 46% expressed active distrust, and a mere 3% said they highly trusted the results. Among seasoned professionals, the "highly trust" figure dropped to just 2.6%, with 20% reporting strong skepticism.
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In short, developers certainly use AI, but trusting the technology to get the job right on its own is another matter. And after IT leader Jason Lemkin's experience with a Vibe programming project that disintegrated, taking with it a production database, who can blame them?
The Stack Overflow study also found that the biggest single frustration, cited by 66% of developers, is dealing with "AI solutions that are almost right, but not quite," which often leads to the second-biggest frustration, at 45%, being "Debugging AI-generated code is more time-consuming."
As Bill Harding, CEO of Amplenote and GitClear, noted in GitClear's AI Copilot Code Quality study, which analyzed 211 million lines of code, "developers trust the current generation of AI assistants about as much as we trusted the previous generation, i.e., not much."
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