Stack Overflow's sixteenth annual developer survey, published today, finds the trust debate around AI tools is no longer binary. Adoption has effectively plateaued, with 83% of developers now using AI in some capacity, but the degree of trust varies sharply by task. Only 6.6% of respondents say they are prepared to trust AI for important decisions, while nearly half say they only trust AI output when they can verify it themselves.
Source attribution has emerged as a central concern: 78.7% of developers say knowing where an AI-generated answer came from matters or matters a great deal when evaluating it. The finding arrives at the same time as organisational policy continues to lag adoption: only 24% of companies surveyed have published an approved AI toolset or a formal AI policy, leaving the majority of developers making tool choices individually.
The survey covered more than 100 questions across 318 technologies. On AI usage patterns, 65.9% of respondents use coding assistants or agents, 62.5% use general-purpose chat tools, and 26.2% use automated agent workflows. Among the heaviest users, 31.1% of daily AI users spend four or more hours a day with the technology.
Beyond AI, the survey captures notable shifts in how developers work. Freelance and sole proprietor arrangements have more than doubled since 2025, rising from 3.9% to 10.5% of the survey population. Remote work remains the most common arrangement at 34.8%, ahead of hybrid at 19.9% and fully in-person at 17.6%.
Developer satisfaction is low. Only 22.3% describe themselves as happy in their current role. The most common response is complacency, with 45.1% classifying themselves that way, and among that group, burnout or tech fatigue is the leading cause at 21.1%.
On future LLM preferences, Anthropic leads the field: 49% of respondents say they want to use Anthropic models versus 32.1% for OpenAI. Current usage, however, is neck and neck: 74.4% report using Anthropic and 74.1% OpenAI.
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