Developer trust in AI tools declines despite increased usage

The 2024 Developer Survey by Stack Overflow, the latest in an annual series, highlights growing concerns among developers about the use and trustworthiness of artificial intelligence (AI) tools. This year’s survey included insights from over 65,000 developers across 185 countries and revealed a significant gap between the adoption of AI and the trust in its outputs.

Ryan Polk, Chief Product Officer at Stack Overflow, commented on the evolving perception of AI by developers, stating, “In the last year, it’s become clear that while GenAI is an incredibly powerful tool, it is not a catch-all for the problems technologists and enterprises aim to solve.” He emphasised that understanding developers' thoughts on AI and machine learning, their concerns, and the ethical issues surrounding these technologies is crucial for harnessing AI’s potential while minimising its drawbacks.

The survey found that 76% of respondents are using or planning to use AI tools, an increase from 70% in 2023. However, the favourability rating of AI has fallen from 77% last year to 72%. Trust in AI tools remains low, with only 43% of developers trusting the accuracy of these tools, a marginal increase of 1% from the previous year. Additionally, nearly half (45%) of professional developers believe that AI tools struggle with complex tasks.

Key ethical concerns among developers include AI’s potential to circulate misinformation (79%), missing or incorrect attribution for sources of data (65%), and ingrained biases that do not represent diverse viewpoints (50%). Despite frequent headlines suggesting otherwise, 70% of professional developers do not view AI as a threat to their jobs.

Geographically, India and Spain have the highest AI favourability ratings at 75%, followed by Brazil and Italy at 73%, and France at 71%. On the lower end of the spectrum, Germany reported a favourability rating of 60%, Ukraine at 61%, and the United Kingdom at 62%.

Beyond AI, the survey explored other significant trends in the developer community across various technologies and tools. For instance, JavaScript continued its long-standing dominance as the most popular programming language, with a preference rate of 62%. HTML/CSS (53%), Python (51%), SQL (51%), and TypeScript (38.5%) also ranked highly among programming languages. AWS was found to be the top cloud platform used by 48% of developers, with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud gaining marginal increases in their user bases.

The survey also highlighted the growing importance of online resources for learning to code. A notable 82% of developers reported using online resources to learn to code, an increase from 80% in 2023. Technical documentation (83%) and Stack Overflow (80%) were identified as the top resources, with 37% of respondents also using AI tools for learning purposes.

Visual Studio Code emerged as the most popular integrated development environment (IDE), used by 74% of developers, more than double the usage of its nearest competitor, Visual Studio (29%). In terms of AI search tools, ChatGPT was the most used at 82%, followed by GitHub Copilot (41%) and Google Gemini (24%).

Communication tools also showed varying popularity based on use cases. Microsoft Teams was the preferred synchronous tool among professional developers (56%), while Discord was more popular among those learning to code (70%).

The survey results offer a comprehensive overview of the current state of software development, providing valuable insights into the preferences, concerns, and emerging trends among the global developer community.