Stack Overflow polled 30,903 developers. Only 7% trust AI with important decisions.
Stack Overflow's 2026 developer survey drew 30,903 responses from 169 countries, The Register reported on 10 October.
Nearly a third of the developers who use AI daily spend four hours or more of a workday with it. About 80% of daily users spend at least an hour.
Across the tools, 66% of respondents use coding assistants or tools that write code on their own, and 17% use no AI tools at all.
Trust is higher when the output can be checked. Only 7% trust AI output for important work decisions. 48% trust it when they can verify the output, and 79% call source attribution "important or very important".
Chief executive Prashanth Chandrasekar said developer scepticism "acts as a critical safeguard", adding that "developers need to know where an answer came from". Stack Overflow has its own stake in that answer: it sells paid access to its archive to AI companies, on condition that answers are attributed.
The survey measures stated trust. It does not say whether AI-written code and settings changes pass the same testing as other changes before they reach a finance or supply-chain system.
Who signs off on AI-written changes before they reach the live system your company runs on?
Image: AI-generated.
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