Stack Overflow survey finds devs hooked on AI, but not totally sold on its judgment

Nearly one in three developers utilize AI daily, dedicating four or more hours to it during their workday, according to the latest survey from Stack Overflow. Responding to a question on their usage habits, approximately 80 percent of these daily AI users reported employing the tools for at least an hour each day. The survey, which received contributions from 30,903 developers and technologists across 169 countries, also uncovered a degree of distrust among developers regarding the reliability of AI-generated information.

Only around 7 percent of respondents expressed confidence in AI output for significant work decisions, while 48 percent felt comfortable with it when they could easily verify the output. A substantial 79 percent of participants considered source attribution to be either important or very important when determining the credibility of AI-generated technical answers.

Stack Overflow's CEO, Prashanth Chandrasekar, remarked that the overall skepticism from developers towards AI has become a vital protective measure as AI agents become increasingly autonomous. He emphasized that developers need to know the origin of an AI-generated answer, the context that informed the information, and crucially, whether they can verify its accuracy and relevance.

The survey revealed that 66 percent of developers employ coding assistants or coding agents, while 63 percent utilize general-purpose chat tools, and 26 percent rely on automated agent workflows. An additional 17 percent of respondents indicated they did not employ AI tools at all. The commercial partnerships Stack Overflow has maintained with AI companies have not been without controversy.

In early 2024, the company launched OverflowAPI, granting paid access to its question-and-answer content in exchange for AI providers attributing answers to relevant posts. This arrangement led to user dissatisfaction, particularly after OpenAI was added as a partner. Users expressed a preference to remove their posts rather than allowing them to be used to train OpenAI's models, fearing a loss of reputation scores.

The survey also highlighted that 52 percent of respondents had acquired a new coding skill or programming language during the previous year, with AI code-generation tools ranking among the most common learning resources, followed by technical documentation.