New data from Stack Overflow’s 2025 Developer Survey exposes a critical blind spot: the mounting technical debt created by AI tools that generate “almost right” solutions, potentially undermining the productivity gains they promise to deliver. AI usage continues climbing—84% of developers now use or plan to use AI tools, up from 76% in 2024. Yet trust in these tools has cratered. Only 33% of developers trust AI accuracy in 2025, down from 43% in 2024 and 42% in 2023. AI favorability dropped from 77% in 2023 to 72% in 2024 to just 60% this year. Developers cite “AI solutions that are almost right, but not quite” as their top frustration—66% report this problem. Meanwhile, 45% say debugging AI-generated code takes more time than expected. AI tools promise productivity gains but may actually create new categories of technical debt. AI tools don’t just produce obviously broken code. They generate plausible solutions that require significant developer intervention to become production-ready. This creates a particularly insidious productivity problem. Most developers say AI tools do not address complexity, only 29% believed AI tools could handle complex problems this year, down from 35% last year. Unlike obviously broken code that developers quickly identify and discard, “almost right” solutions demand careful analysis. Developers must understand what’s wrong and how to fix it. Many report it would be faster to write the code from scratch than to debug and correct AI-generated solutions. The workflow disruption extends beyond individual coding tasks. The survey found 54% of developers use six or more tools to complete their jobs. This adds context-switching overhead to an already complex development process.