More and more developers are adopting AI, but the trust they have in its outputs is getting worse and worse over the years.

This is according to Stack Overflow’s 2025 Developer Survey, which gathered responses from 49,000 developers across 177 countries.

This year, 84% of respondents say they are using or plan to use AI tools for development (up from 76% last year), but 46% say they don’t trust the output of those AI tools (up from 31% last year).

More specifically, 75.3% said they don’t trust AI-generated answers, 61.7% had ethical or security concerns about AI-generated code, and 61.3% said they want to be able to fully understand their code.

“The growing lack of trust in AI tools stood out to us as the key data point in this year’s survey, especially given the increased pace of growth and adoption of these AI tools. AI is a powerful tool, but it has significant risks of misinformation or can lack complexity or relevance,” said Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of Stack Overflow. 

The survey found that for 45% of respondents, debugging AI-generation code is time consuming, which is one of the key frustrations with dealing with AI-generated code.

Stack Overflow also found that only 31% of respondents are currently using AI agents, and of those, 69% said they have seen an increase in productivity. Seventeen percent are planning to use them in the future, while 38% don’t plan to ever use them. 

Additionally, 64% of developers don’t perceive AI as a threat to their jobs, a slight decrease from last year (68%). 

The report also found that 69% of developers have spent time learning new coding techniques or languages in the past year, and 44% used AI tools for learning (up from 37%) last year. 

Finally, while developers are using AI to assist with their work, a majority (77%) aren’t partaking in vibe coding for their professional work. 

Other interesting findings from the survey are:

  • 24% of developers are happy at their current job—a slight increase from last year’s 20%, likely related to pay raises
  • 32% of developers work remotely and 45% of US developers work remotely
  • GitHub surpassed Jira as the most desirable collaboration tool

For more insights, the full survey findings are available here.