Stack Overflow’s 2025 developer survey revealed a puzzle: Developers’ use of AI rose, with more than 84% of respondents using or planning to use AI tools in 2025. But their trust in those tools dropped sharply: Only 29% of 2025 respondents said they trust AI, down 11 percentage points from 2024. At the risk of stating the obvious, the trustworthiness of a tool is important. Trust determines whether organizations can realize the productivity, scalability, and innovation potential of AI. It impacts whether AI-generated code makes it to production or needs to be rewritten by humans. It affects whether organizations scale AI adoption or keep it confined to low-stakes experiments. And it influences whether the next generation of developers learns to work effectively with AI or not. To be clear, when we talk about trust, we mean confidence that AI outputs are accurate, reliable, and rooted in relevant context.…