Most Go language developers are using AI-powered software development tools, but their satisfaction with these tools is middling, according to the 2025 Go Developer Survey. The survey also found that the vast majority of Go developers—91%—were satisfied with using the language.

Results of the survey, which featured responses from 5,739 Go developers in September 2025, were published January 21 in the go.dev blog.

In the survey, 55% of respondents reported being satisfied with AI-powered development tools, but this was heavily weighted towards “Somewhat satisfied” (42%) vs. “Very satisfied” (13%). Respondents were asked to tell something good they had accomplished with these tools as well as something that did not work out. A majority said that creating non-functional code was their primary problem with AI developer tools (53%), while nearly one-third (30%) lamented that even working code was of poor quality, according to the report. The most frequently cited benefits of AI coding tools, conversely, were generating unit tests, writing boilerplate code, enhanced autocompletion, refactoring, and documentation generation.

Whereas 53% of respondents said they use AI-powered development tools daily, 29% did not use these tools at all, or only used them a few times during the past month. The most commonly used AI coding assistants were ChatGPT (45%), GitHub Copilot (31%), Claude Code (25%), Claude (23%), and Gemini (20%), the report said.

As for the language itself, almost two-thirds of respondents were very satisfied using Go, with the overall satisfaction rate hitting 91%. Developers find tremendous value in using Go as a holistic platform, said the report. “Go is by far my favorite language; other languages feel far too complex and unhelpful,” one respondent said. “The fact that Go is comparatively small, simple, with fewer bells and whistles plays a massive role in making it such a good long-lasting foundation for building programs with it.”

Other findings of the 2025 Go Developer Survey:

• Command-line tools (74%) and API/RPC services (73%) were the top two types of projects respondents were building with Go. Libraries or frameworks (49%) finished third.
• The top three frustrations the developers reported when building with Go were “Ensuring our Go code follows best practices / Go idioms” (33%), “A feature I value from another language isn’t part of Go” (28%), and “Finding trustworthy Go modules and packages” (26%). 
• Most respondents develop on macOS (60%) or Linux (58%) and deploy to Linux-based systems (96%).
• Visual Studio Code was the favorite code editor cited (37%), followed by GoLand/IntelliJ (28%) and Vim/NeoVim (19%).
• The most common deployment environments for Go were Amazon Web Services (46%), company-owned servers (44%), and Google Cloud Platform (26%).