Top AI companies are waging high-stakes battles over coding tools. Startups tell us agents are a natural use case for coding. But how do developers actually feel about the technology that’s shaking up their jobs?
Stack Overflow asked 49,000 of them in its annual survey, and found some mixed opinions. Adoption was indeed growing; around 84% used or planned to use AI in their development process, compared to 76% last year. But positive sentiments were in decline (70% → 60% favorability), while mistrust in its accuracy was on the rise (31% distrusted it in 2024, whereas 46% were skeptical this year.)
Only about 31% of developers said they used agents at least once a month, but around 38% said they had no plans to start doing so. A little over half of those who use them said agents have had a positive effect on their productivity.
“We know more developers are using AI tools, but they’re not having exactly a great experience using those tools,” Erin Yepis, senior analyst of market research and insights at Stack Overflow, told Tech Brew. “There’s more developers that have the ability to try it, and maybe their expectations aren’t exactly where the reality lies.”
Barriers to agency: As far as what’s holding back agentic adoption, developers identified accuracy and security or privacy concerns as their biggest problems with these more autonomous systems.
“One of the top frustrations that developers have is when the AI code isn’t quite right, they have to spend more time sort of debugging the thing that’s supposed to help them save time and get work done faster,” Yepis said.
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Slight 𝗇̶𝗈̶ worries: While AI has caused a lot of worries about declining employment in the tech industry, most developers (64%) said AI is not a threat to their jobs, though that number decreased slightly from 68% last year. Yepis said the survey might be showing that developers are becoming a bit more hesitant about the way AI coding tools are changing their workflows.
“There are just a lot more tools out there now, and I think [they’re] becoming a little bit more wary, as far as, ‘Maybe part of my job is going to change—what part of the job? What is it going to look like in three to five years?” Yepis said.
Vibe check: Developers responding to the survey seemed to overwhelmingly reject the term “vibe coding” to describe what they do; 72% said the loosely defined practice is not part of their development work. The term became popular earlier this year to describe a certain improvisational approach to AI coding, but the trend has also faced criticism from developers. For the Stack Overflow survey, the vibe coding question offered open-ended responses and drew many strong opinions, Yepis said.
“Whether it’s just that the term itself is off-putting or not, I thought that was interesting,” Yepis said. “There’s passionate responses when it comes to developers and their jobs.”