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Stack Overflow Dev Survey: Visual Studio, VS Code Hold Off AI IDEs to Remain on Top
It's no surprise that one of the biggest developer surveys in the industry this year is all about advanced AI, but it might be surprising that all the new fancy AI-powered IDEs/editors haven't dented the years-long supremacy of Visual Studio 2022 and Visual Studio Code.
"Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio still rank as the top IDEs used by developers; however, usage is growing for new AI-enabled IDEs added this year including Cursor (18%), Claude Code (10%), and Windsurf (5%)," said Stack Overflow in announcing the new 2025 Developer Survey, a massive annual undertaking from the site known for crowdsourcing development questions.
As usual, the popularity of IDEs/editors and all manner of other dev tooling was presented in a number of different ways -- such as admired/desired, worked with/want to work with and so on, while also being broken down into respondent categories like professionals, learners and so on.
For the overall popularity ladder, the report noted: "Subscription-based, AI-enabled IDEs weren't able to topple the dominance of Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code this year. Both maintained their top spots for the fourth year while relying on extensions as optional, paid AI services."
[Click on image for larger view.] Most Popular IDEs (partial list) (source: Stack Overflow).
However, IntelliJ IDEA usurped Visual Studio for No. 2 among respondents learning to code, and among pros/learners that use AI.
That JetBrains offering also places second behind VS Code in the Admired/Desired department.
[Click on image for larger view.] Most Admired/Desired IDEs (partial list) (source: Stack Overflow).
"Not only is Visual Studio Code the most used IDE for five years in a row, it is also consistently ranked the most desired IDE. Developers that haven't used VS Code overwhelmingly want to use it in the next year," the report said.
In yet another category, "Worked with vs. want to work with," the impact of the AI-powered offerings is more noticeable.
[Click on image for larger view.] Worked With vs. Want to Work With (source: Stack Overflow).
"The newer AI-enabled editors like Claude Code and Cursor are attracting interest from developers already using the industry standard IDE, VS Code," the report said.
Indeed, as we recently reported, VS Code serves as the foundation for many of its AI-powered challengers (see "Forked Again: AWS's Kiro Is Latest AI Assistant Based on VS Code").
Agentic AI
In the report's AI section, another chart shows the strength of Microsoft-owned offerings in the agentic AI space, where GitHub Copilot and Microsoft Copilot are among the top five tools, led by OpenAI's ChatGPT.
[Click on image for larger view.] AI Agent Out-of-the-Box Tools (source: Stack Overflow).
"ChatGPT (82%) and GitHub Copilot (68%) are the clear market leaders, serving as the primary entry point for most developers using out-of-the-box AI assistance," the report said.
Other findings in the 2025 survey regarding AI and machine learning include:
- A key frustration from 45% of respondents was that debugging AI-generated code is time-consuming, despite often repeated claims that coding can be handled solely by AI tools.
- If AI can do most coding tasks in the future, developers told us why they would still want to ask another person for help:
- Three quarters (75.3%) of users said they don't trust AI answers, 61.7% said they have ethical or security concerns about code, and 61.3% said they want to fully understand their code.
- AI agents are not being used by the majority of developers, with only 31% using them currently, 17% planning to, and 38% of respondents not planning to use AI agents. However, for those developers who have used AI agents at work, 69% agree they have experienced an increase in productivity.
- Despite headlines that imply otherwise, the majority of developers (64%) still do not perceive AI as a threat to their jobs. However, this is a slight decrease from 68% in 2024.
- LLM models used by most developers are OpenAI's GPT models (81%), Claude Sonnet models (43%), and Gemini Flash models (35%).
Other Microsoft-centric Dev Tooling Data Points
While the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey's focus on AI was prominent, the report also contained data on other technologies, including several from the Microsoft ecosystem. Here is a summary of findings of interest to Visual Studio Magazine readers:
In the "Web frameworks and technologies" section, ASP.NET Core was used by 19.7% of all developers who responded to the survey. Here, the top offering was Node.js.
Visual Basic (.Net) appeared in the "Programming, scripting, and markup languages" section, with 4.4% of all respondent indicating they had done extensive development work in it over the past year. That of course places the basically deprecated language well down in the pack, which is led by JavaScript.
When it comes to cloud developer tools, Microsoft Azure was used by 26.3% of all respondents, and 27.2% of professional developers. This places it behind other technologies like Docker and npm but ahead of Google Cloud.
"The growing lack of trust in AI tools stood out to us as the key data point in this year's survey, especially given the increased pace of growth and adoption of these AI tools. AI is a powerful tool, but it has significant risks of misinformation or can lack complexity or relevance," said Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of Stack Overflow. "With the use of AI now ubiquitous and 'AI slop' rapidly replacing the content we see online, an approach that leans heavily on trustworthy, responsible use of data from curated knowledge bases is critical. By providing a trusted human intelligence layer in the age of AI, we believe the tech enthusiasts of today can play a larger role in adding value to build the AI technologies and products of tomorrow."
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.