Exploring the Stack Overflow 2025 Developer Survey

Reis Sirdas — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 13:15:00 +0000

Every year, Stack Overflow publishes its Developer Survey, which offers a useful snapshot of the software development industry.

While we wait for the 2026 results, I wanted to explore the most recent data from 2025 in a little more depth. Stack Overflow already publishes a great overview, but I wanted something more interactive: filters for compensation, employment status, experience, developer role, frameworks used, and more.

So I built a dashboard.

Open the interactive dashboard →

In this blog post, I’ll go over some of the AI-related findings I observed.

The dashboard uses the raw survey data and is filtered to U.S.-based respondents. By default, it shows employed respondents who identify as professional developers, but you can change that from the sidebar.

State of AI in 2025

2025 was a big year for AI in software development. Coding agents such as Claude Code and OpenAI Codex had only recently been introduced, and developers were still figuring out how, or whether, to use them. At the same time, the industry was changing quickly, with AI becoming increasingly difficult to separate from conversations about productivity, hiring, and layoffs.

Agentic coding was not very popular

We are entering the era of agentic coding, which means using AI agents to plan and complete coding tasks with minimal human intervention.

In 2025, 67% of respondents said they did not use AI agents, while only 11% said they used them daily.

Compare this with general AI tool usage, where 60% said they used AI tools at least weekly.

Given that Claude Code and Codex had only recently been released when the 2025 survey was conducted, I expect agent adoption to be much higher in the 2026 survey results.

Agentic coders reported higher pay

Daily users of AI agents reported earning $40,000 more on average ($200k) than those who did not plan to use AI agents ($160k). The difference also appears in a narrower group filtered by experience, developer role, education level, and age, which you can explore here.

I expect the gap to shrink as more companies adopt AI-forward policies, but it will be an interesting metric to track for the next few years.

Will devs get replaced by AI?

Ah, the age-old question. As a dev, it feels like writing code without AI was a lifetime ago.

15% of respondents said they saw AI as a threat to their jobs, while 65% said they did not.

Interestingly, that number rises to 20% among daily users of AI agents and falls to 12% among respondents who do not plan to use them.

There are a few possible explanations:

Daily users have seen what agents can do
- These respondents also gave more favorable answers to other AI-related questions. They may see AI as both useful and potentially threatening.
Company environment
- For example, a company aggressively pushing AI adoption might create more negative sentiment among developers.
Self-selection
- Developers who are already concerned about AI may use it more often to understand it and stay competitive.

Explore the dashboard

I have added several charts that update live as you change the filters. Hopefully, you can use them to explore the data and draw your own conclusions.

All filters are encoded in the URL, so you can share a specific slice of the data with a link.