After hitting a low point last year, developer job satisfaction is officially on the rise. Erin Yepis returns to the show to unpack the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, analyzing how autonomy and compensation are driving this recovery. We also cover the happiness gap between senior and junior engineers, the surprising drop in trust for AI tools, and why vibe coding is failing to catch on with professional engineers.
Show Notes
- Read the full report: 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey
- Stack Overflow Blog: Read Erin’s analysis and more
- Erin Yepis: Connect on LinkedIn
Transcript
(Disclaimer: may contain unintentionally confusing, inaccurate and/or amusing transcription errors)
[00:00:00] Ben Lloyd Peason: Today. I am delighted to be joined by Erin Yepis, research Manager, market Research and Insights at Stack Overflow. Erin, it is lovely to have you back on the show. We had you last year, uh, to cover your the Stack Overflow Developer Survey, and it was one of our favorite episodes.
[00:00:15] Ben Lloyd Peason: We're thrilled to have you returning for the 2025 edition of this.
[00:00:19] Erin Yepis: Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be back as well. And definitely back to be talking about the developer survey.
[00:00:26] Ben Lloyd Peason: Yeah. So we'll, we'll link to the full survey in the show notes. it's been out for a couple of months. this isn't quite the latest coverage or the latest news on it, but we definitely wanted to make sure we got some time to cover it this year. As always, you know, it is just packed with a ton of fascinating data and I feel like I still haven't got enough time to just really dive into it because there's a lot that I've just sort of been picking up as I've been looking at these charts.
[00:00:49] Ben Lloyd Peason: But I just wanna start by covering some of the things that are new in it this year. for our listeners who may have missed last year's show, Maybe Erin, if you could just give us a quick overview of the [00:01:00] methodology behind the 2025 survey.
[00:01:02] Ben Lloyd Peason: You know, like how many developers did you get to respond, you know, were there any new areas of focus or things that you changed from last year just at a high level? Like what? What's different this year?
[00:01:12] Erin Yepis: Yes. So, uh, this year we ran the survey, we launched it at the very end of May, and we closed June 23rd in 2025. we got responses from just over 49,000 developers worldwide, covEring, 166 different countries. this year the survey was very different. a lot of it was the same. the survey that developers on Stack Overflow have come to know and love, but we changed a lot and I would say, two of the big changes.
[00:01:42] Erin Yepis: Can be summed up with, the technology section updating, what technologies we were asking about, asking about some new ones. Um, and specifically some of the new technologies we were asking about were AI agents. So sort of building on the, the new questions we've been asking since 2023 about [00:02:00] AI tool usage at work, in the developer's workflow, but more specifically AI agents and.
[00:02:07] Erin Yepis: What tools developers are using, uh, for specific steps of the Agentic workflow.
[00:02:13] Ben Lloyd Peason: Yeah, I really loved the agentic stuff when I was digging into it, and I feel like there's probably a lot of potential for growth in that area for future surveys too. So, you know, there there's the obvious, increased focus on ai, which we're definitely gonna talk about. but are there other, any other like major trends or changes that you think define,
[00:02:30] Ben Lloyd Peason: The landscape for developers in 2025 compared to what we saw last year, last year I feel like we were in the midst of a lot of new, exciting things with ai. There's still so much uncertainty around it, and I feel like now we're starting to get a little bit more clarity and certainty around AI within software developers' life.
[00:02:49] Ben Lloyd Peason: But you know, I'm just wondering like what kind of changes you've seen over the last year.
[00:02:54] Erin Yepis: a couple, of big ones, especially related to ai. We saw that AI usage. [00:03:00] Number increasing for us. And I mean, there are a lot of surveys out there that have wildly different numbers for, AI usage, but we, uh, try to be more specific, asking more granular questions this year. But yeah, so AI usage bumped up to 84%.
[00:03:15] Erin Yepis: One of the other big things, you know, I was digging into after the survey results came back was just the shift in the age ranges for, the developers that are responding to our survey. we've noticed from, all the way back to 2022, sort of like a decline in the proportion of 18 to 24 year olds that are responding to the survey and, um.
[00:03:41] Erin Yepis: I think that, Stack Overflow is a platform that. really attracts experienced developers, those people that have those complex questions and also have answers to those complex questions. So it's not totally surprising, but I did try to go out and sort of validate, you know, is this like a, a bigger shift that we [00:04:00] see?
[00:04:00] Erin Yepis: I think it's corroborated by, a lot of, uh, news stories and some statistics that are related from, sites like Indeed, and definitely like, uh. Some of the labor statistics that come out that these junior roles are, there's less of them, that new graduates are having a hard time finding their entry level roles. But we also have seen in, other sources such as, uh, slash data has a, a developer survey, data. Were sort of also. Capturing a slightly lower amount of 18 to 24 year olds, not as low as ours was. but also last year's Jet Brains developer Survey had about the same proportion of 18 to 24 year olds that we saw.
[00:04:42] Erin Yepis: interestingly enough, the, uh, jet Brains developer survey recently, the new one 2025 one came out and they had almost, I wanna say, uh, a 10%. Percentage point bump an 18 to 24 year olds this year, but they have a lot [00:05:00] more, respondents from China, whereas we do not, we have a lot of respondents that are based in North America, Europe, uk, India.
[00:05:08] Erin Yepis: So, I think that might have something to do with it. but I do think that. What we're seeing it's not very, it's not biased. It's maybe a little bit biased by our community on Stack Overflow, but I think there's like a larger trend for just less software developers that are younger.
[00:05:28] Ben Lloyd Peason: Yeah, that's, that's, that's actually a really fascinating insight and it's not, it kind of aligns with something that I've been, I don't know if anticipating is the right word, but sort of predicting in a way is that in the short term, a lot of the junior roles are gonna be heavily disrupted within software development because so much change is happening and we're seeing that with AI in particular, like a senior engineer with AI, seems to be able to get, extract a lot more value out of the tool versus a junior engineer.
[00:05:54] Ben Lloyd Peason: if they're using AI the wrong way, they actually create, I think can create more challenges and more problems than they [00:06:00] actually can get benefit from it. but I've also wondered, if that is temporary, The disruption to the junior, the lower end of the job market is, is just a, a natural response to so much disruption happening.
[00:06:12] Ben Lloyd Peason: So much uncertainty. People are a little more cautious when hiring junior developers. but I've also had this theory that. Within a couple of years, you're gonna start to see people come out of college armed with AI capabilities right out the gate. And then suddenly the junior role, maybe what we consider a junior role today starts to look more like a senior role today.
[00:06:33] Ben Lloyd Peason: and the senior role like continues to evolve and become more high level. So I've, I've kind of had this theory that maybe this, these disruptions we're seeing are actually only like a, like a two to four year temporary disruption and we might just be in the midst of it, you know, which is pretty fascinating.
[00:06:48] Ben Lloyd Peason: But speaking of jobs, I mean one of the big topics we talked about last year was developer job satisfaction. 'cause there was, there's sort of a shocking number from last year's result about, you know, how few [00:07:00] developers were happy, with their employment situation. You know, last year the, big alarming takeaway was that only one in five developers were happy at their job.
[00:07:09] Ben Lloyd Peason: So 80% were either complacent or unhappy at their work. and this year the survey says that that number's about one in four developers are happy at their current job. So do you think that this represents like some sort of actual real improvement or is it just like a minor shift, in like what is otherwise a, like a more complacent workforce?
[00:07:30] Erin Yepis: I, uh, do believe it's a, a meaningful shift. I'm looking at, Percentage points, all the time. So anything that's above two percentage point difference, I'm like, that means something. more so again, because this is a an NPS rating score for this question, there's less of that sort of wishy washiness.
[00:07:49] Erin Yepis: For the people that are happy, those are people that definitely agreed at the very top of the score, that they are happy at work. I definitely think also that, so [00:08:00] as you were mentioning with the sort of shift in, roles and the disruption. What we were seeing, like there's been those charts, uh, that have come out about, openings and hirings for technology related jobs may be just sort of normalizing back to pre pandemic levels.
[00:08:19] Erin Yepis: So, they were feeling that a lot more in 2024, I think, than in 2025. And so with all of that churn, it doesn't necessarily mean that, there's more people that were fired or hired, uh, necessarily between last year's survey and this year's survey, but I think maybe just a little less of that churn in your workplace can contribute to, what was maybe causing some of that discontent.
[00:08:46] Erin Yepis: Also, I think that as we've been more, getting used to these AI tools at work, there might be a little bit of that effect of the Stanley Kubrick film, how I stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb [00:09:00] where they maybe whatever was like on the horizon that they were worried about.
[00:09:05] Erin Yepis: Now it's just like, I can't really be worried about that anymore.
[00:09:08] Ben Lloyd Peason: we all spent last year throwing AI slop at each other and, and kind of decided, you know what, maybe this isn't the right way to do it, so we should just get a little more refined in our AI usage.
[00:09:19] Erin Yepis: Yeah.
[00:09:20] Ben Lloyd Peason: Yeah. But yeah, thinking back to a year ago, I mean, we were on the show covering quite frequently.
[00:09:25] Ben Lloyd Peason: All of the, the rounds round after round of layoffs that were happening at a lot of the big companies primarily the companies that did really higher tons during the pandemic. and you know, there's still some elements of that that I think are still happening, but it certainly doesn't feel like it's a thing that's happening every week anymore.
[00:09:43] Ben Lloyd Peason: And I'm sure that, better job security, less uncertainty around the future probably does play a pretty significant role, in overall satisfaction. And, the survey also mentioned that there was, a pay bump that happened for a lot of developers too over the last year.
[00:09:59] Ben Lloyd Peason: you know, I'm wondEring, [00:10:00] is there anything that you found that was interesting about pay in terms of, how that's going for developers?
[00:10:06] Erin Yepis: Yes, I think that, again, specifically we noticed that for experience levels, for developers that have been, uh, working with code for 10 years or more, their, uh, job satisfaction is higher than. Any other experience level, some of the earlier career developers and mid-career developers, so I think that has something to do with it.
[00:10:28] Erin Yepis: Experience developers would be commanding a higher salary as well. They know more about what they have a skill set in to find those roles that they are going to. Be very good at. besides that, I think again, and we talked about this last year, the, the effect of which country you live in is tied to salary, is tied to the roles that you're able to find and is definitely tied to, job satisfaction as well.
[00:10:55] Erin Yepis: So, I think like last year we were talking about how developers in, in the [00:11:00] Netherlands are, are. Pretty happy. you know, looking specifically at the developers that were unhappy this year, we see that at the top of the list. we had India and Germany and Australia for, and specifically for backend developer roles, which is a role that is like one of the most popular roles that people responding to the survey have.
[00:11:21] Erin Yepis: but it's also kind of ambiguous. You're doing like that role is defines. Very differently and very in, in various different places. And I think that, in those countries also, like pay probably has something to do with it. Just the work conditions is one thing, but where you're getting paid is another and related.
[00:11:41] Ben Lloyd Peason: Yeah, it's, it's fascinating that that experienced developers. Or, tend to be more happy. And I, and I wonder if this has something to do with, with a trend that I've started to pick up on that. A lot of people who have been in the industry for a while view what's happening right now as like this extremely exciting time to get back [00:12:00] into building.
[00:12:00] Ben Lloyd Peason: So if you've, found yourself in a role where you're more strategic or you're managing, or you're being a team lead and maybe you've spent the last few years not building as much, but helping teammates, managing Now you can take all of those skills that you gain from years of being a builder, plus all of that strategic capability and knowledge.
[00:12:19] Ben Lloyd Peason: And with AI, you're able to do so much more than than we've been able to do in the past. And it, it almost makes like the role exciting again, in many ways because, you know, I, I have certainly felt this like, I started my career doing a lot of like cis admin automations type development work and, you know, the things that I'm able to do with AI back when I started my career, I mean, it's incredible how much, faster I'm able to do things that.
[00:12:45] Ben Lloyd Peason: Would've taken me hours or even days, back then. So pretty fascinating to to hear, you know, experience like it, it definitely tracks with, with what, with what I'm personally feeling and what I'm seeing from other people in the industry. But you know, with all that said, so you know, [00:13:00] it, it seems like roughly one, one and a quarter or one out of every four developers are happy.
[00:13:04] Ben Lloyd Peason: About one out of every four developers are unhappy with their job. That's a pretty equal split. And in the middle you have about half of developers that are still feeling complacent about their. About their work. So I'm wondEring what the data tells you specifically about, you know, these developers. Like what, what seems to be leading to still having complacency being the most common, reaction that developers have for their job?
[00:13:28] Erin Yepis: we also asked in a survey similar to last year, but a little bit differently, we asked, developers, respondents to rank what attributes of their job contribute most to. Being satisfied at work. And so, for everyone, those were like, at the top of the list is autonomy at work. Followed by compensation, followed by solving real world problems.
[00:13:52] Erin Yepis: I would say for those that are complacent at work, those are still very important things to them, but they're probably just ranked slightly [00:14:00] differently, depending again on role. So role I think is probably a huge driver of, of why and experience level of why you are. Are or not satisfied with your current job, where you're working.
[00:14:12] Erin Yepis: so it's, there's individual shifts for, you know, what at this point in your career is more important to you. conversation is important to everyone, but I think that as you get more experience at work or more experience in your specific role, the other two things sort of start like shifting with each other.
[00:14:31] Erin Yepis: in terms of importance that autonomy at work is something that we see shift a lot with different roles and different, experience levels with the less experienced developers. Autonomy at work is not as important. I think that's because they're trying to learn and learning comes with collaboration and having like some direction and having some mentorship.
[00:14:56] Erin Yepis: I definitely think for the complacency factor, it's just like having sort of like [00:15:00] the, importance that you assign to those top three factors is sort of shifting a little bit and you have a little bit of more of one than the other in your current position.
[00:15:09] Ben Lloyd Peason: So I wanna. To pivot just a little bit to the subject that we always end up talking about on every episode of Dev Interrupted nowadays, and that's ai, specifically sentiment and usage around it. and I think the big takeaway that we had when we looked over this data was this sort of,
[00:15:25] Ben Lloyd Peason: Almost conflicting trend that we see a little bit of. So, in the survey it says 84% of respondents are either using or planning to use ai, which, we already mentioned that. I think it, it tracks with a lot of other surveys that we've seen out there. Like the DORA report just came outfew weeks ago and, said I think about 90% of developers are using AI on a frequent basis.
[00:15:48] Ben Lloyd Peason: And that's up from, you know, in the Stack Overflow surveys up from 76%. So it's a, a noticeable jump, but at the same time, positive sentiment for AI has actually [00:16:00] decreased by about 10%. From 70% to 60%. So, like, what's going on here is, were we in the honeymoon phase last year and that's wearing off, or is there something else happening?
[00:16:10]
[00:16:11] Erin Yepis: it is very interesting and it, it's been probably the, the most. Intriguing finding from the survey. I will say I think the, what we also see, I, I know is that, so as I had mentioned at the top, we changed this question a little bit to be more granular, like if you use AI tools, are you using them daily, weekly, or monthly or less frequently?
[00:16:33] Erin Yepis: And so we see there is a correlation between developers that mentions they use AI tools daily or weekly. Their, favoritism towards AI tools in general. So they have higher favorability scores than those that said they use it less frequently or are planning to. I think that speaks to, again, you know, as you have.
[00:16:55] Erin Yepis: Gone through the learning curve, you have found something that works for specific [00:17:00] purposes. You've seen it succeed and in the areas where you have problems, you know how to troubleshoot those problems. one of my other favorite questions from this year's survey, I don't think a lot of the respondents liked it because I had to read their responses, was, the one about vibe coding.
[00:17:16] Erin Yepis: when you look at the responses for that question, there's a lot of responses that are like, I try to use this and you know, three outta
[00:17:25] Ben Lloyd Peason: a year,
[00:17:25] Erin Yepis: it was wrong. So the hallucination factor, and I think that is, so if you're not using these tools as frequently, that. The effect of, you know, I, I came to this restaurant once I'm giving it a, a one star Yelp review.
[00:17:39] Erin Yepis: It's, I just, it was too frustrating to even like, go back to or try to find an alternative because of the bad experience I had a handful of times infrequently and, you know, I, I'm here to like, tell everyone about that Again, we're, we're still in the honeymoon phase, I think, like you said. so [00:18:00] the, there's a lot of maybe turmoil in trying to find like the right tool for the right job and also finding the time to learn how to use these tools.
[00:18:09] Erin Yepis: We asked, another question specifically. in the last year, did you learn, to code for ai and about two thirds of respondents mentioned that they had. Learn to code for AI in the past year, but only half of them did it at work and the other half did it for personal projects or at home. So that also I think speaks to you're not getting enough time at work to even.
[00:18:35] Erin Yepis: Like learn, set up a foundational basis for how would I use this? When is an appropriate time to use this? What are the, the skills that I need to get better at using this for this specific use case? also besides that, we have like a, a cool chart that, pivots That sentiment score against what the specific uses that you're using AI tools for.
[00:18:57] Erin Yepis: So, while most developers are using it for [00:19:00] search and code completion, you see that, favorability score drop. For some of the other use cases, the less, used use cases, uh, deployments is a big one. Uh, so I think that. There are some complex things that we're just in the beginning stages of getting the right tools for that job where, and then now we have to get those roles, the people in those roles used to, and time to learn how to use those tools for that specific job.
[00:19:31] Ben Lloyd Peason: I really love your, your restaurant analogy. 'cause I even feel like there's a big element of, oh, well I went to that restaurant six months or a year ago when they first opened, and the service stunk, so I never gave them another shot. and I feel like AI has gone through a very similar.
[00:19:46] Ben Lloyd Peason: transformation or impact because, you know, a, a year ago context, windows were tiny, and hallucinations were a big problem because of it. But today, context windows have gotten much larger. The reasoning has gotten better. So things that, you know, didn't work at [00:20:00] all a year ago now may actually work just straight out of the box.
[00:20:03] Ben Lloyd Peason: And we've also seen, you know, there's sort of like an inverted bell curve with AI adoption. Like when, when a developer first adopts ai, they're like, wow, this is new and exciting. There's so many cool things I can do with it. And they get to sort of that like intermediate level and they start to see all the problems, all the failures that it has.
[00:20:19] Ben Lloyd Peason: And they, they, like their perception will often drop and think, wow, this is terrible. Like, why am I wasting my time with this? But then that curve comes back as they get better with it, as they start to use it, they find use cases that they can use it. Daily or weekly. Suddenly their eyes get opened and they're kind of back at the top of the perception curve where they're like, wow, this is incredible.
[00:20:38] Ben Lloyd Peason: Like, my productivity is way up. I'm doing things that I never thought I would be able to do before. So there's, I imagine there's probably some sort of element of that too, where a lot of people are just, are still sort of stuck in that middle area where they've seen the potential, but when they've tried to implement it, in reality, they're still struggling, And it definitely resonates you know, relates to what I'm hearing from. Just people in my own [00:21:00] personal network, like I know a lot of really brilliant engineers who are doing AI constantly in their free time, like in their nights and and weekends. Just like, again, like the getting excited about building again and they're doing all these really amazing personal projects.
[00:21:13] Ben Lloyd Peason: But then they get to work and they're like, well, I can't really figure out how to apply like what I'm doing at home to my work environment. 'cause we have so many additional constraints that just make it unfeasible. you know, my, one of my favorite stats from this whole survey is, you know, and I, and I resonate w with this as somebody who uses AI daily, I, I still resonate with this stat, but 66% of developers are frustrated with AI solutions that are almost right, but not quite.
[00:21:39] Ben Lloyd Peason: what other frustrations are you seeing, from developers who are reporting lower levels of satisfaction?
[00:21:45] Erin Yepis: I think, again, going back to one, the experience level speaks a lot to this. we see based on experience level, these developers use are using very different tools. They have experience with [00:22:00] different AI tools and it definitely is related to, the restrictions that you have at work.
[00:22:06] Erin Yepis: We have to use Microsoft copilot at work, and I don't like that we have to use, you know, insert blank here. so I think it has a little bit to do with that. Uh, whereas like for the early career developers or especially those that are learning, they're playing around with some of, the sandbox, areas, the, the free trials, the um, non-commercial use.
[00:22:30] Erin Yepis: tools that, you know, especially like we have, there's, there's free versions of almost all of the, the ides that maybe not so much anymore, but of the, at least back earlier in 2025. So, you know, they were not beholden to maybe those strict, larger organization enterprise wide. Like, we're locking this down.
[00:22:51] Erin Yepis: You, you can't try this, this new one that came out, or the one that everyone's buzzing about. but I think it also has to do with the fact that, when you see, [00:23:00] in that chart that sort of pits the favorability scores against the, what are you using these tools for? because there are some tools that I think are marketed as they can do it all the, the fact is that they can do.
[00:23:17] Erin Yepis: Technically can do it all, but they do some things better and other
[00:23:20] Ben Lloyd Peason: It is.
[00:23:21] Erin Yepis: not as well. So they are having frustrations with, uh, okay, we were sold, or, you know, our company was sold, this we're locked in and now my role, I have to do deployments. This is not helping me. so I think it's those frustrations of like, We need a different tool for this. I need a different AI tool, or I need a different, AI agent. I need a different integration. Something that is I think more tied to work. Definitely work and experience level.
[00:23:50] Ben Lloyd Peason: Yeah, that's really interesting 'cause just thinking about my own usage, you know, I'm, absolutely not behold into a single tool. You know, I found that. You know, there are certain things that [00:24:00] Claude is amazing at, and there are certain things that it's terrible at. So I, I try to use it for the stuff that I love it for and avoid it for the other things.
[00:24:06] Ben Lloyd Peason: And, you know, the same is for chat, GPT. The same is for basically every model that I've used. And then you have all the tools that are built upon those models as well, that are all sort of built for different functions. So, definitely checks out with my personal experience. You know, so building on this, so, the survey found that a lot of developers actively distrust the accuracy of AI tools more so than they trust them.
[00:24:30] Ben Lloyd Peason: how are you seeing this trust deficit play out? Likedoes it differ between like professional developers and those are who are still learning to code? or is it, you know, sort of just based on what you were describing, like the professionals are sort of stuck with a certain tool set and because of that they have lower levels of trust.
[00:24:47] Erin Yepis: Well, so we do see, that trust score improve slightly with, younger, developers, less experienced or younger in age, but not by much. I think more [00:25:00] so it's not that. it's like it shouldn't be seen as a, a negative effect of, of AI tools. Rather, that with more usage comes the knowledge that.
[00:25:11] Erin Yepis: AI tools should not be fully trusted. That is part of the deal. That should be, that is built into like the, the foundational knowledge when you start using them, especially at work. you know, your InfoSec team sets you up with a lot of these trainings every year about phishing. And then don't click on these links and do not answer the phone and give someone your boss's email address and phone number.
[00:25:37] Erin Yepis: there's lots more information now than there was back when AI tools first started coming out. That is like, no, this is trust, but verify. Trust but verify, uh, do not start with trust. There is, this is the, you are the important, the human is the important part of this equation. The AI tool is here to help you expand on what you were already [00:26:00] doing, but.
[00:26:00] Erin Yepis: You are trust begins and ends with the human. So, uh, rather than seeing it as like this is, uh, maybe the, the quality is changing or, or anything about that, it's more that developers are smarter. The whole world is smarter. We know we're not supposed to trust AI tools completely.
[00:26:19] Ben Lloyd Peason: Yeah, it's funny 'cause there's so few tools in our, in our workflow that, that you would use the word trust with. You know, like, do you trust your IDE? It's like, well, I trust it as far as I can build something with it.
[00:26:32] Erin Yepis: Well, and there's like specific tools that have the word trust in them.
[00:26:35] Ben Lloyd Peason: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, if you're thinking about like a security tool, for example, trust is a huge aspect of it.
[00:26:40] Ben Lloyd Peason: Like do you trust that it's actually catching the things that are important to your organization? So I want to get a little bit more into like workflows and, and developer tooling. and specifically talking about how developers are using these tools. So one of the distinctions that the Stack Overflow survey made this year was between, and you already touched on this a little bit between AI tools and [00:27:00] AI agents, and, uh, found that the majority of you.
[00:27:03] Ben Lloyd Peason: Developers are still not using agents with 38% saying they actually have no plans to at all at this point. Um, so can you first of all define what the survey calls or what, how the survey defines an agent? 'cause there's a lot of different definitions for that term. Um, and then let's talk a little bit about why you think that adoption may be lagging for that.
[00:27:25] Erin Yepis: Yes, and I had just pulled up the survey website because for all of these, these stats we have the actual question that we used in the survey printed alongside it, so I can keep myself honest. But, so for AI agents. We specifically said AI agents refer to autonomous software and the entities that can operate with minimal to no direct human intervention using artificial intelligence techniques.
[00:27:52] Erin Yepis: I know that sounds vague, but it's definitely less vague than, how we define, do use AI tools, which is, the only thing we were specific about there is like. [00:28:00] Are you using this for development at work? not just like asking ChatGPT over the weekend, where should we go get dinner? because we're all doing that, and that would just say a hundred percent.
[00:28:11] Erin Yepis: But, uh, so yeah, for AI agents, we have like a, a lower, a usage score there. I think that makes sense. The fact is, and I try to be, you know, specific and generic because I think the, what an agent means, you know, it's marketed in one way. I think, you know, when Salesforce came out with Agent Force and a lot of the marketing around that, it made it seem like agents were just something that you like, extensions that are part of enterprise sas.
[00:28:41] Erin Yepis: Programs. But as time has moved on, like agents are something that is definitely a part of open source, huge part of open source, software right now. And are, that's probably a, a bigger place where you see like the sort of the growth of like what an agent can do. What exactly does that mean for, a [00:29:00] software developer's job?
[00:29:01] Erin Yepis: Even though though I try to have that, uh, sort of all encompassing definition, I do believe that that marketing tactic is a little sticky. when they see that question, they're like, no, I don't have this enterprise software solution that says agent in the title. I think that might be part of it, but, the o other part of it is.
[00:29:21] Erin Yepis: you know, especially for the professional developers, which, you know, a huge segment of the software respondents are of the survey respondents, apologies are our professional developers. A lot of them are experienced professional developers and at their work that, you know, again, with the locking down, like, you can use these tools.
[00:29:39] Erin Yepis: This is what is okay to use at work agents. They're like, no, we have to verify all of this. There's too many of them, and that sounds like it will be more of a security risk. So I believe that maybe a little bit of the lag there is just speaking towards like the, the workplace, getting up to speed with what they can and cannot use.
[00:29:59] Erin Yepis: [00:30:00] What is an agent doing for them?
[00:30:02] Ben Lloyd Peason: Yeah. And, and I think a, a lot of the challenge with agents is that, it, it's, I, I don't really know of a single agent out there that you can just buy off the shelf and start. Using like on day one, you know, um, a lot of this stuff takes a, a lot of effort to build e even if you are buying a product, you still have to get your organization ready to use that agent effectively.
[00:30:23] Ben Lloyd Peason: Whether it's cleaning up the data that you feed into it, or. Having processes built around it. and I think that's, you know, a lot of the challenges of adopting an agent is actually organizational. It's not even, a tooling problem. It is a technical problem. 'cause often, giving an agent everything it needs to be effective.
[00:30:41] Ben Lloyd Peason: It does require, technical work. But it really feels like a lot of the challenges are, are organizational. And you know, speaking of that, one of, the things that, that caught my eye in the survey, is how agents are being incorporated into development workflows. So. All right. You know, the, the report specifically mentions that there's, there's a lot of personal [00:31:00] productivity gains that agent users are seeing.
[00:31:03] Ben Lloyd Peason: but there doesn't really seem to be a whole lot of team collaboration improvement that's coming out of them yet. it seems almost like these AI agents are currently like a solo productivity tool in particular. Like, do you, do you think that's gonna change sometimes, sometimes soon, or what, what do you think is contributing to that?
[00:31:19] Erin Yepis: I definitely do think that's going to change and I, you know, even in my own limited experiences, starting to work with AI agents and see what they can do for my job. I, uh, so specific example is, we have a tool at work that is approved and they allow you to connect agents or create your own. I was
[00:31:43] Erin Yepis: partnering with another researcher and we're like, yeah, let's build this agent. Let's go, let's learn how to do it. And I go to configure it and it's, I can't share it with her. I can't share my configuration in the UI with her. So there's that. It's like literally built [00:32:00] sometimes to not be as, I think, less so on the open source side.
[00:32:04] Erin Yepis: but for the, these enterprise ones that have been approved by work, it's like. Not yet there. Like the collaboration options are limited for some of them, maybe. but also the, the other part of it is, I think that you have, that's a, that's a cultural thing. Collaboration that has to come from your team, your leadership that has to be built into the way that you do work.
[00:32:29] Erin Yepis: And they have to be pushing, you know, your managers or whoever team leads are pushing. Should be pushing like these projects, like let's get collaboration. The goal is collaboration and now let's try to implement an AI tool for this specific project. Or we have to complete this project. let's see if there's any creative ways that we can do parallel work with, an ai, tool that we have, or, start, playing around with a new agent that we are.
[00:32:59] Erin Yepis: Trying to [00:33:00] see if it may work, if we want to buy the licensing for. So, that I think more is, it has to come from the, the workplace, the collaboration part, but then also there are those, technical, capabilities that. They have not built that into some of these tools yet. I will say, you know, as far as collaboration goes though, that they're, I've seen they've, they've been coming out with a lot more, especially for stuff that, is related to, CICD and GitHub, for instance, and trying to like, get agents plugged in there, that's built for collaboration.
[00:33:32] Erin Yepis: So, uh, whenever there's a, a way to sort of integrate it into tools that, you know are. Collaboration positive. There is a, an interesting tool that I've been playing around with still trying to, um, get it set up like regularly is a spec story. So you're, the whole point of that is that in your prs you're sharing what it is that you and the agent were doing.
[00:33:57] Erin Yepis: Anyone can read that.
[00:33:59] Ben Lloyd Peason: Yeah, and I mean, [00:34:00] just thinking back to like where I was a year ago, just generally speaking about ai, like not even agents, but a year ago, I feel like the technology was changing so rapidly. the tools we were using was still relatively immature. It was really challenging for me to share what I was building for myself with other people on the team, because by the time I share it, like some of what I share becomes irrelevant.
[00:34:20] Ben Lloyd Peason: Or it might be that I, I built this thing specifically for myself and there's not a whole lot to like. Take and adapt to other parts of the organization. But sometime in like the last three to six months, I've started to feel that shifting where now the tooling is catching up to our team needs and we're able to, to more openly share things that we build, you know, AI services that we build with each other, give each other tips that actually have a lasting value rather than just being an immediate value to, to yourself.
[00:34:48] Ben Lloyd Peason: So, yeah, it is, a hopeful trend, I think for agents as a whole. I'm not gonna let you leave without talking about one of my favorite subjects right now, and that is vibe coding. And I know this is a, this, this [00:35:00] always generates a bit of controversy when you bring this up, but in the survey, most respondents, so about 72% are not vibe coding today, at least according to their own admission.
[00:35:10] Ben Lloyd Peason: And an additional 5% are emphatic about it not being a part of their development workflows. And, you know, this kind of flies in the face of what you'll see from all the people out on social media, either saying, vibe coding is amazing, and it's the future, or it's the worst thing ever, and no one should ever do it.
[00:35:26] Ben Lloyd Peason: what's going on here? Like,you know, why aren't people vibe coding yet?
[00:35:31] Erin Yepis: Well, um, you know, and I, again, the wording of the question is definitely in the survey microsite. I try to be very specific. I links to the, the Wikipedia page for it. It's a, you know, it's, it's a term that came up in the. Past year or so, and I only refer to it because, well, one, we definitely had leadership at Stack Overflow.
[00:35:53] Erin Yepis: They're like, you should be asking about vibe coding. We wanna know. but, it's has, I think it, it's a loaded [00:36:00] term and maybe there's some, uh, I feel like there, it's the loaded nature of it is because it infers maybe that's, you are not capable of doing your work. You need, you need the help. And I think a lot of people that have worked with these tools more know that that's not the case, but they still are not like, I'm not gonna call em vibe coding.
[00:36:25] Erin Yepis: So that is why I added that emphatic, part in there, whatever it was an open response question. So. I, um, used a an NLP algorithm to sort of group together, uh, a lot of the responses and they were very colorful responses. And, you know, in general we had, uh, a question, you know, I added a, a, give us feedback on the survey question this year we got a lot of feedback in the survey in general of like, I don't like that you asked so many AI questions this year.
[00:36:56] Erin Yepis: So, um, you know, the Stack Overflow community is. [00:37:00] More aligned with the human part of the process for developing, getting answers, thinking through problems. I think that the reason for the response for Vibe coding and the survey this year was what it was, is because they are doing all of those things.
[00:37:20] Erin Yepis: They are thinking through using their own skills. They are using AI tools. They are starting to use AI agents, but they would never call what they're doing vibe coding because they are still, there's definitely the human in the loop. Like emphatically that yes, emphatically no, they're not just like walking away from the computer and refilling their coffee cup and coming back to a, a finished product.
[00:37:44] Ben Lloyd Peason: Yeah, there's definitely a negative connotation with the term that I feel like it doesn't deserve at this point. I wonder if maybe. Maybe if you next year, just as a recommendation, I guess, uh, if you called it age agentic coding, maybe there would be a lot more positive or maybe even do [00:38:00] both. Like do you vibe code, do you agentic code, and sort of see the difference in results.
[00:38:04] Erin Yepis: and also I think the loaded term, it's, it kind of is giving Gen Z vibes. And so we have, you know, like I said, we have, older skewed, uh, respondent base and they're like, no, I'm not Gen Z. I'm not doing ski. Whatever.
[00:38:22] Ben Lloyd Peason: Oh, yeah, yeah, that's, that's, yeah, I'm with you on that. So, all right, so I'm gonna close out with some, some high level takeaways from this. So, you know, one of the things we've been talking a lot about, professional developers, organizations that are dealing with, you know, poor job satisfaction, complacency at work.
[00:38:39] Ben Lloyd Peason: So for our, our audience of engineEring leaders who are listening right now. You know, they're probably thinking about things like retention, team health, like what are the biggest takeaways from the survey that you have on how to reengage those developers who might be feeling complacent or, or just down about their work.
[00:38:56] Erin Yepis: Yeah, so I would refer back [00:39:00] to those top facets. That respondents ranked like the top three for what contributes to their job satisfaction. while maybe many leaders, they definitely have a say in, um, compensation, they might be a little hamstrung on that, but the autonomy at work and solving real world problems could definitely be something that becomes more of a focus.
[00:39:22] Erin Yepis: And, I think that, you know, something that's come up in, uh, I've heard from our leadership and I've heard from this podcast is the, the idea that, you know, instead of it being top down mandated, here's a tool use it or consequences. It's trying to encourage like the. What do you think? Getting input from the development teams about, uh, these AI tools or if we should implement this, rather than just having the finance team, you know, set up a, a workflow that is like, all right, get used [00:40:00] to it.
[00:40:00] Erin Yepis: This is what we're doing. It's that part can, incur one, it it, it will bring into the, the collaboration factor up that we're having, like open conversations, trying things out together. Trying to find solutions that work well for everyone that's going to be involved with the AI tooling that is going impact their work, but also giving them that space to learn that they, you know, we all need to learn in order to use some of these tools.
[00:40:27] Erin Yepis: Some of them are easier than others and that they have time at work to like really dig in and, and give it, you know, the time that it needs. So that. It can become part of their workflow. It can be, and it's not less of that frustrating factor of like, this failed a couple of times and I don't have time for this.
[00:40:45] Erin Yepis: I don't have time to learn how to fix it.
[00:40:46] Ben Lloyd Peason: Yeah. Yeah. All right. I got one more question before I, before I let you go. Uh, so as you're looking forward to 2026, you know, what, what are the trends that you're watching, you know, and specifically like what, what would you want to evaluate when this survey comes out next [00:41:00] year?
[00:41:00] Erin Yepis: I think the biggest one is, I'm always constantly interested in how developers are learning. I know that they're, they are of every age range of every experience level. They are learning every year. They're learning for different reasons. They're using different ways to learn. So that's top of mind for me.
[00:41:19] Erin Yepis: You know, one of the new questions we asked this year was about, um. which community platforms have you been using in the past year? And, you know, stack Overflow is one of them, but it's just so interesting to see how YouTube continues to be a huge, uh, it's a huge community platform, for developers and, uh, you know, podcast.
[00:41:41] Erin Yepis: Definitely. I think it plays into that too. Um, getting to see like those overviews, the video format. So what. Uh, I wanna continue to explore like what new things are coming up that are helping developers or anyone in the tech space learn, and how is that changing and, you know, how [00:42:00] is, digging more into this, uh, idea of like, how has.
[00:42:05] Erin Yepis: Work been affected by new tools rather than just like asking, the trust question and the favorability question, but that could easily be, we dig into that a lot more. Like, what, what are you doing with this? Uh, I feel like we already asked a bunch of questions, so I'll remove some of the, I'll replace though.
[00:42:22] Erin Yepis: So there's not just like. A whole entire AI survey, but there's so many things to ask about. And you know what, going back to, uh, I just started looking at the JetBrains developer survey for this year. They mentioned, they asked 500 questions. So yeah, I only, I only asked like 70, so, you know, I could be, it could be worse.
[00:42:46] Ben Lloyd Peason: And with AI is more easy than ever to generate survey questions, right?
[00:42:50] Erin Yepis: And you know what? That. You know, anyone can use AI to answer any of these open response questions. I read that, that I'm like, there's no way ai, especially the vibe coding would, AI did not [00:43:00] respond to that question.
[00:43:01] Ben Lloyd Peason: Yeah. All right. Well Erin, this has been really fantastic. Um, before we wrap, we're gonna, our listeners follow your work and learn about what's going on over at Stack Overflow.
[00:43:11] Erin Yepis: Yes, I definitely, encourage anyone to go check out the Stack Overflow blog. I, usually post, a survey analysis there. We're going to have a new survey analysis coming out soon about, what developers are frustrated by and spending time on at work and, checkout Stack Overflow. We have tons of new stuff. Coming up soon. That is going to be really exciting. Stack overflow.com.
[00:43:35] Ben Lloyd Peason: Fantastic. We'll, we'll be sure to link to everything in our show notes, and that's all for this week. But remember, you're only getting half the story if, you're only listening to this podcast, go check out our substack Dev Interrupted dot substack.com to find all of our in-depth news articles and stories.
[00:43:50] Ben Lloyd Peason: And Erin, we'd love to have you back sometime either on our Substack on the podcast. We always enjoy having a conversation with you. And thanks again. It's been a ton of fun having you here.[00:44:00]
[00:44:00] Erin Yepis: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.
