The State of Development 2025

Your systems are on fire. (And no one can agree on how to put it out).

The PagerDuty alerts won’t stop, exec is scrambling to get AI on the roadmap, and your team is facing major disconnects. The problem is that individual contributors (ICs: Developers, Engineers, etc.) and decision makers (DMs: Leads, Managers, Execs, etc.) are living in two different realities.

This is why we surveyed 226 tech pros around the globe to figure out when, where, and why alignment breaks down. We want you to understand what’s at stake and how your team can start moving forward together.

Here’s what we found:

Everyone is racing toward AI

94% of teams say they’re using AI, but only 39% have reliable frameworks to support it.

Workflows pose a problem

Only 1 in 4 teams have smooth workflows — everyone else is busy firefighting.

Reliability is personal

48% of decision makers lose sleep worrying about customer churn during downtime.

It's all breaking

35% of devs say complex, long-running workflows break constantly.

Everyone’s ‘using AI,’ but very few know how to keep it from falling over. That knowledge gap isn’t just inconvenient, it’s a dealbreaker when you’re trying to scale agentic systems without a way to retry, resume, or even observe what went wrong.

Most teams think they’re modern. Most teams also admit they’re stuck. Somewhere between post-build (“we built it!”) and pre-scale (“oh god, how do we scale this thing?”), the real challenge begins.

Why should it matter to you?

You might be so jaded that you view this friction as a standard occurrence. Something to grit your teeth and endure to the best of your ability, but is impossible to solve. This isn’t the case.

The State of Development 2025 gives you the language, data, and insights to advocate for change. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the one writing the code or approving the budget.

See the pain and change the system.