Stack Overflow was built on a simple idea. If you are stuck, ask someone else who has been there before. For years, that worked. Now AI has changed the habit, not the doubt.
New data from Stack Overflow shows a sharp split in how developers feel about artificial intelligence. More than 80 percent of users say they are already using AI tools, or want to use them, for coding help. But only 29 percent say they actually trust AI to give reliable answers.
The gap is striking. It also explains a lot about the mood across tech right now.
Developers complain about AI answers being wrong, vague, or confidently incorrect. They worry about jobs, shortcuts, and skills getting weaker. At the same time, they keep opening ChatGPT, Copilot, and other tools because they are fast and often good enough to get started.
Stack Overflow’s CEO, Prashanth Chandrasekar, says this tension shows up everywhere in the community.
“People are curious,” he said in a recent interview. “They want the speed. They want the convenience. But they don’t fully believe what they are getting back.”
That conflict has shaped Stack Overflow’s last three years.
When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, traffic patterns shifted almost overnight. Simple coding questions dropped off. Many of them were now being answered by AI tools instead of humans on forums. At the same time, AI-generated answers started flooding Stack Overflow itself, hurting quality and trust.
The company responded by banning AI-written answers on its public site. That rule still stands. The goal, Chandrasekar said, was to protect Stack Overflow as a place where answers are checked, voted on, and tied to real experience.
Yet Stack Overflow did not reject AI outright. It leaned into it, carefully.
The company now sells enterprise tools that let businesses use AI grounded in their own internal knowledge bases. It also licenses its massive archive of questions and answers to AI companies that want high-quality training data. And earlier this year, it launched an AI assistant that pulls from Stack Overflow’s own content first, instead of free-floating guesses.
This approach reflects what the numbers suggest. Developers want AI as an interface, not as an authority.
“They like talking in natural language,” Chandrasekar said. “They just don’t want to blindly trust the output.”
That helps explain why usage keeps rising even as skepticism stays high. For many developers, AI is not a final answer. It is a draft, a helper, or a way to break through a mental block before checking the work themselves.
Also Read: Google Translate Introduces Gemini AI for Real-Time Voice Translation
It also explains why complex questions still land on Stack Overflow. According to the company, advanced problems did not disappear. Only the easy ones did.
If a task has one clear answer, AI is often enough. If it involves edge cases, trade-offs, or real-world systems, developers still turn to other humans.
There is also a cultural layer to the distrust. Stack Overflow’s core contributors spent years building a shared knowledge base for free. Some are uneasy seeing that work repackaged into AI systems that may replace parts of the job they care about.
That friction has not gone away. But it has not stopped people from using the tools either.
Across tech, the same pattern repeats. People say they dislike AI. They say it feels risky, sloppy, or overhyped. Then they open it again the next morning.
Chandrasekar does not see that as hypocrisy. He sees it as adaptation.
“This is a probabilistic technology,” he said. “Developers are used to exact answers. That takes time to get used to.”
For now, the trust gap remains. AI is everywhere, but belief in it lags behind. Stack Overflow’s data puts numbers on a feeling many in tech already recognize.
AI is becoming hard to avoid. Trust, on the other hand, is still being earned.
Leave a Reply