What the 2026 Stack Overflow Developer Survey tells us about where trust goes next
If you’ve followed Docker lately, you know we’re all-in on sandboxes. We’ve spent a ton of time talking about the difference between sandboxes and containers, and helping our customers and the industry as a whole understand when to use which. In fact, Docker president Mark Cavage dedicated his opening keynote at WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America to this exact topic, using live demos to show why sandboxes (and not containers) provide the level of isolation required to contain autonomous agents.
To be clear: none of that means we suddenly think less of containers or the vital role they will continue to play in the software development process and ecosystem. We are Docker, after all. And lest anyone forget, as the just-released 2026 Stack Overflow Developer Survey confirmed yet again, when it comes to containers, there’s Docker, and there’s everyone else. Docker is the most used (59%) and most desired (38%) tool in the survey’s cloud development category.
Now, we can all agree that the tech industry is inundated with surveys these days. Vendors, analysts, research firms, everyone’s got a groundbreaking new survey. So, if your reflex response to reading about new survey results is to roll your eyes and think here we go again, well, I get it.
But the annual Stack Overflow Developer Survey isn’t just another survey. When it comes to the developer community, it’s arguably the survey, the one developers themselves pay attention to. Over the course of 16 years, it has become something of a de facto standard for those of us interested in truly understanding how developers think and act. Released earlier this month, the 2026 survey reached more than 30,000 respondents across 169 countries.
Of course, this year’s survey did more than just remind us of Docker’s continued container dominance. It painted a picture of an industry in transition as developers grapple with one of the biggest questions in technology right now: how to bridge the gap between what they want to do with agents and what they can securely and confidently run in production.
Consider:
- Only 7% of developers trust AI output for important work decisions. Nearly half (48%) trust it only when they can verify it themselves.
- Security and privacy ranked as the second biggest factor in whether teams adopt or expand AI tools (behind only accuracy).
- Nearly one in four developers said AI-related security or privacy issues cost their team valuable time in the past year.
Put it all together, and the missing ingredient is clear: trust. Developers want to tap into everything agents make possible without crossing their fingers and hoping “everything” doesn’t include a catastrophic security failure.
I didn’t point out those earlier Docker numbers just to brag (though, hey, I’m a marketer, so it was at least part of it). I mentioned them because they’re a reflection of trust — trust earned across more than a decade helping developers make software portable, open, reproducible, and secure.
Today, we’re building on that foundation and extending that trust into the agentic era. At WeAreDevelopers, you saw the first steps. We launched Docker Cloud Sandboxes, published the next-generation Sandbox Kit specification (which we’ve committed to submitting to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation), and built nearly everything we showed around one idea: helping developers manufacture trust for AI agents.
If it all looked and felt like a slightly different Docker, that was intentional. We’re at the start of a transformative era for Docker, and you’ll see a lot more from us in the coming weeks and months.
But no matter how much the industry changes, and no matter how much we evolve along with it, one thing won’t change. Docker will continue to run on trust.
If you’d like to see what that looks like in practice, try Docker Sandboxes (and get a $250 credit if you sign up before Oct. 31). You can start an agent on your laptop, ship longer jobs off to the cloud, and bring the results back. We’d love to hear what you think.
