The reasons to reject a technology are nearly universal. The top three deal-breakers for all developers are security or privacy concerns (Rank 1), prohibitive pricing (Rank 2), and the availability of better alternatives (Rank 3). The lack of AI is the least important factor (Rank 9).

The most recognized impacts are personal efficiency gains, and not team-wide impact. Approximately 70% of agent users agree that agents have reduced the time spent on specific development tasks, and 69% agree they have increased productivity. Only 17% of users agree that agents have improved collaboration within their team, making it the lowest-rated impact by a wide margin.

Architect is a new role we added to the survey this year and is the fourth most popular role for respondents.

OpenAI's GPT models top the large language model list with 82% of developers indicating they used them for development work in the past year. Anthropic's Claude Sonnet models are used more by professional developers (45%) than by those learning to code (30%).

Anthropic's Claude Sonnet is the most admired LLM this year (behind Gemini Reasoning) and second most desired (33%).

45% of developers responding to the Developer Survey this year have been coding less than 10 years.

Developers turn to Stack Overflow for human-verified, trusted knowledge. About 35% of developers report that their visits to Stack Overflow are a result of AI-related issues at least some of the time.

84% of respondents are using or planning to use AI tools in their development process, an increase over last year (76%). This year we can see 51% of professional developers use AI tools daily.

Stack Overflow is a frequent destination for information. A strong majority (82%) visit at least a few times per month, with 25% visiting daily or more often.

Ukraine and France swapped places this year compared to last, placing France in the top 5 list of responding countries.

Over 36% of respondents learned how to use AI-enabled tools for their job or to advance their career in the last year.

Subscription-based, AI-enabled IDEs weren't able to topple the dominance of Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code this year. Both maintained their top spots for the fourth year while relying on extensions as optional, paid AI services.

AI agents are not yet mainstream. A majority of developers (52%) either don't use agents or stick to simpler AI tools, and a significant portion (38%) have no plans to adopt them.

uv is a Python package manager built in Rust; need we say more about why this is the most admired (74%) SO tag technology this year?

Of the top-reporting countries in this year's survey, the US has the highest number of developers working remotely (45%). 21% of developers in Germany say the choice to go into the office or work remotely is completely up to them.

After more than a decade of steady growth, Python's adoption has accelerated significantly. It saw a 7 percentage point increase from 2024 to 2025; this speaks to its ability to be the go-to language for AI, data science, and back-end development.

Most professional developers who indicated they used Google Gemini last year, are interested in other AI-oriented subjects like "Large Language Model" or "RAG", and tools like "Ollama".

This pattern holds true for both Professional Developers and those Learning to Code, showing that developers at all levels are actively exploring the rapidly evolving AI landscape rather than committing to a single tool or platform.

Respondents learning to code use Youtube for community more than professional developers (70% vs. 60%).

Conversely to usage, positive sentiment for AI tools has decreased in 2025: 70%+ in 2023 and 2024 to just 60% this year. Professionals show a higher overall favorable sentiment (61%) than those learning to code (53%).

More developers actively distrust the accuracy of AI tools (46%) than trust it (33%), and only a fraction (3%) report "highly trusting" the output. Experienced developers are the most cautious, with the lowest "highly trust" rate (2.6%) and the highest "highly distrust" rate (20%), indicating a widespread need for human verification for those in roles with accountability.

While all age groups want lists and articles, younger developers show a significantly higher interest in more social and interactive formats. For example, 37% of 18-24 year olds want "Chat (people)", compared to only 20% of 55-64 year olds. Similarly, 39% of the youngest cohort want "Coding challenges," also aligning with a motivation to skill up.

More developers are happy at work this year (24% vs. 20% last year). This is likely related to that pay bump in the data for certain roles this year.

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: "Debugging AI-generated code is more time-consuming" (45%)

Rust's growth is directly tied to the success of its build tool and package manager, Cargo, which is the most admired (71%) cloud development and infrastructure tool this year.

Jira steps down as the most desired tool for code documentation and collaboration and the new top desired tool is GitHub. Markdown continues to be the most admired sync tool for the third year.