Back in early July 2025 we had a look at what we thought might be in the StackOverflow Survey results for 2025. Well now the StackOverflow 2025 Developer survey results are out, let us have a look at what we predicted and see if we were correct. We will also take a look at some other interesting trends that came out of the survey and any surprising or new things of note.
Our Predictions
In our previous blog we looked at 6 likely trends for the 2025 survey. These covered Programming languages, Databases, Cloud Platforms, Edge Computing, IDEs and of course AI. Lets take a peek at each of these predictions and how close (or not) they were.
Programming Languages
We said that we thought that it was safe to say that JavaScript, Python and SQL (along with HTML and CSS) would still dominate the most Popular Programming Language lists.
Well, there were no surprises here then. JavaScript, HTML / CSS, SQL and Python make up the top four respectively. So, we got that right – well were on pretty safe ground there to be honest. There really were no big surprises in the top 10 at all.
We then switched to the always interesting list of languages that developers desire. We felt that Rust and Go would continue to be desired but also that the Zig (a general-purpose programming) language and Lua might well feature highly in this list.
Well Rust was the most admired language of all with 72.4% although from a desired point of view it does less well with 29.2%. Go didn't do so well as was at 23.4% for desired and 56.5% for admired. Gleam was another language which was highly admired at 70.8% and that had not even been on our radar before the survey was published. Zig was again well admired with 64.2% although Lua has dropped off a bit with 46.9% admired. Perhaps unsurprisingly the most desired language was Python with 39.3% desiring it – and a respectable 56.4% admiring it as well.
Databases
Again we felt that the old stalwarts of mean Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL and Oracle would do well as would , PostgreSQL, which only entered the developer survey in 2018. In the NoSQL category we expected MongoDB and Redis would also remain popular.
Looking at the Database results, they align very well with our predictions, with all of above database systems in the top 6. However, we did fail to mention the popularity of SQLite. SQLite is a C-language library that implements a lightweight self-contained SQL database engine. It can be found in mobile phones etc. Last year it was the third most popular database and it retains that position.
Cloud Platforms
As you might expect we predicted that Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud are likely to still dominate this section.
Interestingly the survey this year mixed cloud platforms with tools used on these platforms such as Docker. This makes it a little harder to compare like with like. However, AWS was still the most popular cloud platform with 43.3% os respondents saying they use it. That is a little down on the 48% from 2024 but still a very strong performance. Microsoft Azure is effectively second with 26.3% using it (compared with 27.8% last year). Google Cloud is still third 9in terms of the platforms) with 24.6% in 2025 and 25.1% in 2024.
Interestingly Docker is now becoming the de facto standard tool for cloud development with 71.1% of users saying they use it (compared to 53.9% back in 2024).
We also suggested that one trend to look for in the StackOverflow survey is the rise of AI-Driven Cloud Services. It is not that easily to see this but there is a trend towards using AI for IT operations, Business process automation and cybersecurity – all of which touch on AI-Driven cloud services.
Edge Computing
We also expected Edge Computing will increase in importance. Edge Computing is the idea that data processing functions should be placed closer to the source of that data rather than in some remote processing facilities.
The 2025 Stack Overflow Developer survey does not have a specific section related to edge computing, if you look at related technologies and themes this can give some indication of whether it is increasing in importance or not.
For example, Docker has become increasingly important in the cloud computing world and containers, and containerization is a fundamental technology for edge computing. Similarly, tools such as pip and npm are widely used within containers for such applications. So, although it is not a direct indicator we still think edge computing is growing in importance.
IDEs / Editors
We expected that Visual Studio Code (or VSC as most people know it) would again dominate the StackOverflow survey results.
Well, oh boy has it come to dominate. Of all respondents 75.9% indicated they use VSC. Second place Visual Studio had only 29%. Interestingly third was Notepad++ with IntelliJ IDEA in forth. Although as IntelliJ IDEA and PyCharm etc. are essentially the same tool just with different configurations if you add together all of those respondents then the JetBrains tool set would come much higher up the scale (although still some way of Visual Studio Code).
We also predicted that perhaps the most interesting aspect of the editor / IDE lists will be the continued prevalence of ‘old school’ style editors such as Vim and Neovim.
Vim and Neovim again do very well. Vim comes in 5th (for the second year) just behind Notepad++ and intellij IDEA. Neovim has dropped from 9th down to a still has a respectable 10th with the number of users up from 12.5% to 14%.
Perhaps the one editor to note out of the survey is Cursor – the AI Code Editor (well at least that's its by line). It focuses on using AI to help with the coding process. It comes in at 6th in the list and didn't even feature in the 2024 list.
AI
We suggested that there would be a significant emphasis on AI in the survey and its results. We expected that survey respondents would show that their use of AI tools and services will have grown (even over that shown in 2024). Whether that is through the use of Generative AI services such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini or DeepSeek or tools integrated into their IDEs, many (most) will now be using AI in some form or other. Whether this is to generate tests, help write code or understand documentation. Etc.
The category which most closely matches the 2024 AI Search and Developer Tools section is now the ‘AI Agent out-of-the-box tools’ category. Here ChatGPT still dominates the list with 81.7% (82.1 in 2024) of respondents using it. GitHub Copilot comes second with 67.9% (41.2% in 2024) and Google Gemini third with 47.4% (23.9% in 2024). This means the usage of GitHub Copilot and Google Gemini is increasing but ChatGPT is relatively flat (albeit from a much higher starting point). We thought DeepSeek might feature but it is not in the list.
However, we also suspected that the ‘sentiment’ towards AI tools would be far lower.
So, let’s look at the second of the survey focussing on AI. Nearly half of all respondents said that they use AI Tools daily (47.1%) whereas only 16.2% of respondents said that they didn't use AI tools and had no plans to do so. However, only 22.9% had a very favourable sentiment for AI. The favourable category as better at 36.8% but over 20% of respondents were unfavourable or very unfavourable towards AI.
This was echoed in the accuracy of AI Tools section where only 3.1% highly trust the technology but a whopping 45.7% either somewhat distrust or highly distrust the accuracy of AI tools! Perhaps tellingly 39.6% of respondents think AI tools are bad or very poor at handling complex tasks and 16.8% don’t use AI tools for complex tasks at all.
It is also fascinating to look at the AI workflow and tool satisfaction graph. Here Ai tools seem to be used most when helping to document code, learn new technology, provide answers to questions and used to understand a codebase.
The biggest single frustration with AI, cited by 66% of developers, was dealing with "AI solutions that are almost right, but not quite," which often leads to the second-biggest AI frustration: "Debugging AI-generated code is more time-consuming" which was cited by 45% of developers.
An interesting new trend that you may have read about online is Vibe Coding. However, based on the StackOverflow respondents it has not really caught off in the way that the hype might expect you to believe. A very large 77.5% of respondents said that they had not used (or emphatically had not used) Vibe Coding.
Perhaps the biggest shock for managers and those planning how AI will speed up their development workflows is that 41.4% of developers think that AI / AI Tools has no or minimal positive effect on their productivity!
Summary
What can we take away from the 2024 survey? Well in the main the core languages, database, tools etc. remain the same. The majority of the most popular and widely used things are the same as in 2024. However, AI is an exception.
In 2025 there is a massive increase in the use of AI tools. The popularity of tools such as GitHub Copilot and Google Gemini have grown massively and the use of ChatGPT has not declined significantly.
There are also shifting patterns with more developers using AI systems to help them answer technical questions, learn new technologies and document their code.
However, developer sentiment towards AI is low and trust in AI for complex tasks is also low. This is something that AI tools and AI systems vendors will have to improve on if they are to gain the trust of developers.
Perhaps most worrying for those advocating AI as the future and who believe that IA will bring significant productivity gains is that many developers do not yet see this in their current workflow patterns.
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