The results of the 2025 JetBrains Developer Survey are out and indicate just how deeply AI tools have become embedded into  software development. However, while 85% use AI tools for coding and development, only 1% do not express some concern about this situation.

The JetBrains survey ran from April to June, 2025 and, after data cleaning, included 24,534 developers with a wide geographical distribution. Here we focus on the section of the survey report on Artificial Intelligence starting with developers' choice of AI-powered tools:

As might be expected from previous surveys, ChatGPT is the most popular AI tool, regularly used by 41% of developers. GitHub Copilot comes next with 30%. Three other tools are used by more than 1 in 10 respondents - Cursor, 13%; JetBrains AI Assistant, 13% and DeepSeek, 10%. Given that this is JetBrains' Survey coming 4th in the the list of popular tools probably refects some bias, as does JetBrain's Junie having 5%. Google Gemini and Anthropic Claude at 9% and 8% respectively seem under-represented in the survey but had Claude Code's share been added to Claude's it would have been on the same rung of the ladder as Cursor. In 10th place with 4% comes TONGYI Lingma, a tool based on Alibaba Cloud's proprietary large language model, Qwen which is seeing growing adoption in the developer community in China and the APAC region.

JetBrains' findings on how developers are using AI tools reveals that they are inclined to delegate mundane tasks such as producing boilerplate code and converting code from to other languages to AI while less willing to rely on AI for more complex tasks such as debugging and writing application logic code.

Asked about the benefits of relying on AI in the development workflow, respondents refer to time-saving and efficiency: 

And the bottom line is that among developers who use AI for coding and development:

• 88% Save more than one hour per week

JetBrains not only looked at how developers are using AI in the day-to-day workflow but also at their attitude towards the acendance of AI tools

So just over half as positive about AI with rest equally spilt between indifferent or uncertain and negatively disposed.

The top concerns are the quality of code generated (23%) and AI tools' limited understanding of complex code and logic (18%). Other concerns include the negative effect on coding and development skills (11%) and job security and future job prospects (9%). One minority concern that is likely to become more prevalent as the the amount of AI-generated code AI generated code increases is that of determining intellectual property.  

More Information 

JetBrains Developer Ecosystem 2025

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