This summary is based on a large-scale survey conducted by the Pragmatic Engineer newsletter in 2025, with nearly 3,000 IT professionals participating. It provides a detailed, chronological look at the tools and trends developers actually use, with key data, notable quotes, and important charts for each category.
1. Survey Overview and Participant Demographics
In April-May 2025, a survey on tech stack and tool usage was conducted among Pragmatic Engineer newsletter subscribers. After removing duplicates, automated responses, and spam, 2,997 real IT professionals' answers were analyzed.
"This is the highest-response survey in Pragmatic Engineer history, offering the most vivid snapshot of today's developer tooling."
Job Role Distribution
- Most respondents are software engineers, with diverse roles (backend, frontend, infrastructure, etc.) well represented.
Experience Level Distribution
- 5-20 years of experience is the largest group, with newcomers and veterans also well represented.
Company Size Distribution
- Evenly distributed from startups to large enterprises.
Primary Work Areas
- Backend development is the most common, followed by frontend, infrastructure, and data.
"The 'average respondent' in this survey is a senior backend engineer with 6-10 years of experience."
2. AI Tool Usage and Trends
AI Tool Adoption Rate
- 85% (2,555 respondents) use at least one AI tool.
- 130 respondents (4%) explicitly stated they don't use AI tools at all, citing company policies, lack of need, or ethical concerns.
Top 9 Most Mentioned AI Tools
- GitHub Copilot ranked 1st, Cursor (AI IDE) 2nd, followed by ChatGPT and Claude.
"One in two respondents said they use Copilot. That's remarkable just four years after launch."
Key Changes and Insights
- Cursor rose to 2nd place just two years after launch, showing explosive growth.
- Claude significantly narrowed its gap with ChatGPT compared to a year ago.
- Perplexity (AI search engine) maintained a steady 4% usage rate.
AI Tool Usage by Company Size
- Larger companies tend toward Copilot, while startups use a wider variety of AI IDEs including Cursor, ChatGPT, and Claude
- Gemini (Google) shows even usage regardless of company size
"Larger companies lean heavily toward Copilot, while startups freely experiment with various AI IDEs."
Other Notable AI Tools
- Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Warp, Graphite, JetBrains AI, Cody, Amazon Q, Ollama, Aider, Cline, Grok, Vercel v0, Tabnine, Mistral, Augment Code, Coderabbit, Bolt.new, Lovable, Devin, Junie, Replit and many other emerging and established AI tools were mentioned.
"Vibe coding tools like Vercel v0, Bolt.new, and Lovable were actually mentioned more by non-developers (founders, directors, leads)."
3. Programming Language Trends
Top 18 Most Used Languages
- TypeScript ranked 1st, Python 2nd, followed by JavaScript, Java, Ruby, Go, C#, Swift, and others.
"TypeScript at #1 is no longer surprising. It's a type-safe language usable on both frontend and backend."
- Swift has established itself as the standard language for iOS development, while Objective-C is mainly used for legacy maintenance.
Most Loved/Disliked Languages
- Ruby on Rails ranks 5th in usage but 3rd in preference -- still widely loved.
- Elixir ranks 16th in usage but 10th in preference, showing very high satisfaction among its users.
"Among today's popular languages, almost none receive 'extremely disliked' ratings. We're in an era where only well-designed languages survive."
4. Most Loved/Disliked Tools
Most Loved Tools
- VS Code, JetBrains, Cursor, Neovim, Vim, Zed, Emacs and other IDE/editors dominate the top ranks.
- Linear (lightweight issue tracking) and Expo (cross-platform mobile framework) also received high marks.
"Cursor at 3rd place just two years after launch is truly remarkable."
Most Disliked Tools
- JIRA is the overwhelming #1 (negative mentions exceed the sum of #2 through #5).
- Confluence, MS Teams, Jenkins, Slack, Notion, Zoom also received many dissatisfaction mentions.
"JIRA drew the most complaints for being slow, complex, and cumbersome."
Top Reasons for Disliking Tools
- Slowness
- Bugs/frequent crashes
- Uncomfortable UX redesigns
- Complexity/feature overload
5. IDE and Terminal Usage
IDE Usage
- VS Code ranks 1st, Cursor 2nd, with JetBrains IDEs (IntelliJ, Rider, WebStorm, etc.) widely mentioned.
- Microsoft vs JetBrains: The two camps split the IDE market.
Terminal/Editor Usage
- Neovim, Bash, Vim, Emacs, Warp, Zsh, Tmux, Ghostty, iTerm2 and others are widely used.
6. Version Control and CI/CD Tools
Version Control
- Git is the overwhelming #1, with SVN, TFS, Perforce, and Mercurial as minorities.
- GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket are the major Git hosting services.
- Self-hosted GitLab remains popular.
CI/CD Tools
- GitHub Actions ranks 1st, followed by Jenkins, Azure DevOps, CircleCI, Argo CD, Travis CI, Bitbucket Pipelines, TeamCity, Buildkite, Gradle, Bazel, Octopus Deploy, NX, Bitrise, and others.
"I didn't expect GitHub Actions to dominate this much. It's only been around for 5 years."
- Large companies (Google, Meta, Uber, etc.) also use many in-house CI/CD systems.
7. Cloud, IaaS, and PaaS Usage
The Big Three Cloud Providers
- AWS ranks 1st, followed by GCP and Azure.
"The survey results likely over-represent AWS and under-represent Azure. Traditional enterprises probably use Azure more."
Other Infrastructure/Platform Services
- Vercel ranks 1st, followed by Heroku, Hetzner, Render, DigitalOcean, Netlify, Fly.io, Railway, and various other PaaS/IaaS offerings.
8. Overall Assessment and Key Takeaways
- AI tools are a hotbed of innovation: Even 2-3 year old startups can lead the market, showing how fast things are changing.
- Traditional areas like programming languages and CI/CD change slowly: Established leaders still dominate.
- JetBrains vs Microsoft IDE competition: JetBrains stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the giant Microsoft.
- Frustration with JIRA may reflect resentment toward "management" rather than the tool itself: It reflects the developer sentiment of "we don't like creating tickets and documentation."
"The real reason people hate JIRA might not be the tool itself, but that 'managers force us to use it.'"
Conclusion
This survey vividly shows what tools developers actually use in 2025, what they love, and what they dislike. It provides diverse insights into the rapid rise of AI tools, the durability of traditional tools, and the true nature of developer frustrations.
"Share your thoughts in the comments! We'd love to discuss more about the state of developer tooling today."
Key Concepts:
AI Tools, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Programming Languages, TypeScript, Python, JetBrains, VS Code, JIRA, CI/CD, AWS, Vercel, Developer Trends 2025