Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025 (Category Management)
The results of the 15th annual developer survey were recently published. Some 49k developers took part between 29 May and 23 June 2025, answering 62 questions covering 314 technologies. For the first time, the study placed particular emphasis on AI agents, large language models (LLMs), and community platforms. Here are the findings I found interesting.
Technology trends
- Python’s popularity grew by 7 percentage points from 2024, linked to its dominance in AI, data science, and backend development.
- Docker rose by a record 17 percentage points, the largest annual increase of any technology in the survey.
- Cargo, Rust’s package manager, led the cloud-development and infrastructure tools category by admiration, with 71%.
Professional changes
- Some 24% of developers are happy in their current job, compared with 20% last year.
- Architect entered the top 4 developer roles; the survey added that role only this year.
- In the US, 45% of developers work remotely, the highest share among the countries with the most respondents.
Changes at Stack Overflow
- Some 81% have a Stack Overflow account, up from 76% in 2024.
- AI-related problems account for 35% of visits, making the platform a source of human-checked knowledge in the AI era.
- AI-tool use rose from 76% to 84% over the year, while positive sentiment fell from 72% to 60% and trust fell from 43% to 33%.
- Some 66% identify “almost right, but not quite” AI solutions as their main frustration. These create a new kind of technical debt: apparently correct code with subtle errors.
- Experienced developers are more cautious about AI than younger developers.
- Agents remain a niche: 52% do not use them or stick with simpler AI tools.
The survey helps reveal several broader trends: 1. A maturing AI development ecosystem. Initial enthusiasm is giving way to a more realistic assessment. Developers are becoming more selective about AI tools. As quality improves, I expect trust to grow and tools to become integrated into specific development workflows, along the lines I discussed in my talk on AI adoption in a large company. 2. Python should keep growing because of AI, ML, and data science. TypeScript will keep taking share from plain JavaScript, and Rust may become more popular. 3. Containerization is already the de facto standard. Docker in every home :) 4. Stack Overflow may become less a destination for people and more a source of truth for agents and a place to validate AI suggestions.
The survey methodology has limitations: 1. Selection bias. It mainly attracts active Stack Overflow users, skewing the sample. 2. Reduced representativeness. Some argue that many developers have moved from Stack Overflow to generative-AI tools, while younger cohorts have not joined. AI skeptics could therefore be overrepresented. 3. The 2025 survey’s AI focus. It included many AI questions, some with a techno-optimistic bias.
This large survey offers plenty of food for thought; it just needs to be digested carefully.
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