Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025

Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025 – Key Insights

The 2025 Developer Survey, Stack Overflow’s 15th annual edition, gathered insights from over 49,000 developers across 177 countries. It covered 62 questions and analyzed 314 technologies, with a deeper emphasis on AI tools, large language models (LLMs), and developer workflows.

1. Technology Trends

• Python continues its rise, with a 7% increase in adoption compared to 2024, strengthening its role in AI, data science, and backend development.
• Cargo (Rust’s package manager) became the most admired cloud development tool, surpassing Terraform and Homebrew.
• Developers showed interest in Google Gemini, LLMs, RAG, Ollama, and Shadcn/ui, reflecting diverse curiosity rather than loyalty to one ecosystem.
• Among LLMs, Claude Sonnet emerged as one of the most admired and highly desired tools, following Gemini Reasoning.

2. Work and Employment

• 32.4% of developers work fully remotely, with another 12.6% enjoying flexible “come-when-you-want” policies.
• 17.9% work fully in-person, while the rest are in hybrid roles.
• When choosing technologies, developers prioritize easy-to-use APIs, robust APIs, and quality reputation over AI features, which ranked lower in importance.

3. AI Adoption and Trust

• AI adoption is mainstream: between 80–84% of developers now use AI tools, up from 76% in 2024.
• Trust in AI is declining:
  • Only 29% trust AI outputs, down from 40% last year.
  • 46% distrust AI results, up from 31%.
  • Just 3% highly trust AI outputs.
• Experienced developers show the lowest trust levels.
• 75% prefer human collaboration over AI in ambiguous cases, citing ethical, security, and reliability concerns.
• 45% of developers spend time debugging AI-generated code, with some teams deploying without full review.
• Agentic AI tools (AI acting with minimal direction) are used by 31% of developers, while 17% plan to adopt them. Those using them report up to 70% productivity gains.
• On job security: 64% of developers don’t see AI as a threat to their roles.

4. Community Participation

• The survey received 49,000+ responses, the lowest since 2016.
• Previous surveys often had 65,000–90,000 respondents, indicating declining enthusiasm for participating in Stack Overflow’s annual poll.

Summary Table

In short, the 2025 Developer Survey shows that AI is everywhere but not fully trusted, Python continues to dominate, and developers value quality, reliability, and flexibility more than flashy AI features.