90% of professional developers now use AI at work, up 14% from 2024, spending a median of two hours per day working with AI tools. Nearly two-thirds rely on AI for at least half their workflow, and for one in twelve development work is now almost entirely AI-mediated. 

These are findings from the inaugural 'State of AI-Assisted Software Development' a report from the DORA team at Google Cloud which takes a dive deep into how AI is impacting the day-to-day routine of the developer. 

To produce the report, data on AI adoption, productivity gains, trust levels, and core software delivery metrics (such as lead time for changes, deployment frequency, and change failure rate) was collected from nearly 5,000 technology professionals across the globe. This was supplemented by insights drawn from over 100 hours of qualitative data.

While the findings indicate the same trends as the 2025 Stack Overflow Developers survey, see Stack Overflow Reveals Trends In AI Adoption, the DORA report shows even more reliance on AI and greater positive impact.  

Almost two thirds of the 90% of respondents who use AI tools describe their reliance on it as at least moderate.

And only 1% of them never turn to AI when they encounter a problem.

As in the 2024 DORA Report, the top use case for AI tools is writing new code, with 71% of respondents who write code using AI to assist them in doing so. The next most popular uses for AI are literature reviews (68%), modifying existing code (66%), proofreading (66%), creating or editing images (66%) and writing documentation (64%).

Conversational AI chatbots are the most common vehicle for interacting with AI, followed by  AI embedded within the IDE.

The survey also found little use of AI agents with a majority (61%) of respondents reporting “never” interacting with AI tools in an agentic mode.

Turning to the positive impact of AI, more than 80% of this year’s survey respondents report a perception that AI has increased their productivity and fewer than 10% perceive AI as contributing to a decrease:  

This leads to the conclusion: 

AI accelerates performance for high-performing teams, making it a critical strategic investment. 

In addition, 59% of survey respondents observe that AI has positively impacted their code quality and only 10% of respondents perceive any negative impacts on their code quality as a result of AI use.

Despite these positive effect of AI, there is still a trust issue:

While almost half of respondents (49%) trust AI-gnerated output "somewhat", those that trust it only "a little" or "not at all" (30%) outnumber those who trust it "a lot" or "a great deal" (24%). This degree of skepticism seems very healthy as it leads us to check or verify what AT tells us.  

More Information 

DORA Report 2025

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Stack Overflow Reveals Trends In AI Adoption

High Level of AI Adoption For Java Development

Web Devs Positive About AI Tools

Programming In The Age of AI  

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