Gap between AI use and trust in its output continues to widen among coders

Stack Overflow has a long history of empowering technical innovation across its global public platform community as well as within private organizations ranging from startups to over 20,000 global enterprises leveraging Stack Overflow for Teams. This annual Developer Survey provides a crucial snapshot into the needs of the global developer community, focusing on the tools and technologies they use or want to learn more about.

This is the second year the Developer Survey includes a section dedicated to the growing landscape of artificial intelligence, which we have expanded in 2024 with questions aimed at gleaning developer’s insights on the top ethical questions in AI, challenges utilizing AI at work, and the impact AI may have on the developer job market.

“In the last year, it’s become clear that while GenAI is an incredibly powerful tool, it is not a catch all for the problem technologists and enterprises aim to solve. Understanding the evolution of how developers think about AI and machine learning in the broader context of their jobs, how they incorporate it in their workflows, and the concerns they have around its usage is crucial to harnessing its power and minimizing its failings,” said Ryan Polk, Chief Product Officer at Stack Overflow. “In one of our other recent surveys conducted in April 2024, 76% of developers using AI tools at work told us they were unsure of how their organization measures productivity. This growing gap between the rising use of GenAI and the lack of clarity of one of its most touted benefits to technologists and knowledge workers is an area where we as a community need to zero in and explore further.”

Key findings in the 2024 survey regarding AI and Machine Learning include:

The gap between the use of AI and its overall favorability continues to widen: 76% of all respondents are using or planning to use AI tools up from 70% in 2023, while AI’s favorability rating decreased from 77% last year to 72%.

Trust in AI tools still remains low as its usage becomes even more widespread. Only 43% of our respondents trust the accuracy of AI tools, which is only 1% higher than last year. Almost half (45%) of professional developers believe AI tools struggle to handle complex tasks.

The top benefit of AI tools for all developers is increasing productivity (81%), while those learning to code list speeding up their learning as the top benefit (71%).

The top three ethical issues related to AI developers are concerned with: AI's potential to circulate misinformation (79%), missing or incorrect attribution for sources of data (65%), and bias that does not represent a diversity of viewpoints (50%).

Despite sensationalized headlines that imply otherwise, 70% of professional developers do not perceive AI as a threat to their job.

Countries with the highest AI favorability ratings are India and Spain (both 75%), Brazil and Italy (both 73%), and France (71%), while lower AI favorability scores came from devs in Germany (60%), Ukraine (61%), and the United Kingdom (62%).

With 68 questions in the 2024 Annual Developer Survey covering 366 different technologies, we explored plenty of topics beyond artificial intelligence, polling our community on their preferred programming languages, cloud platforms, work tools, databases, and more:

More than 65,000 developers participated from across 185 countries, with the United States, Germany, India, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, Canada, France, Poland, the Netherlands, and Brazil representing the top ten countries.

93% of respondents visit Stack Overflow at least multiple times per month if not multiple times per day.

82% of developers learn to code with online resources (up from 80% in 2023), with technical documentation (83%) and Stack Overflow (80%) as the top two online resources consulted. 37% of respondents also say they use AI tools to learn to code.

JavaScript held its spot as the most popular programming language (62%), with HTML/CSS (53%), Python (51%), SQL (51%), and TypeScript (38.5%) holding the top spots behind it. The most popular programming language has been Javascript every year we have done the survey except for two years in 2013 and 2014 when SQL took the top spot.

AWS is the top cloud platform used by developers at 48%, but Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud also increased their share amongst developers. Azure has climbed from 26% to 28% usage and Google Cloud went from 24% to 25%.

49% of our users ranked PostgreSQL as the most popular database for the second year in a row, however those learning to code relied on MySQL (45%) and SQLite (36%) over PostgreSQL (33%).

The most popular integrated development environment (IDE) by a landslide is Visual Studio Code, which is used by more than twice as many developers (74%) than its nearest alternative, Visual Studio (29%).

The top three AI Search tools used by developers are ChatGPT (82%), GitHub Copilot (41%), and Google Gemini (24).

Microsoft Teams is the most popular synchronous tool for professional developers (56%) while Discord is the most popular amongst those learning to code (70%).