Survey reveals rising infrastructure complexity, AI readiness gaps, and a disconnect between engineers and decision makers

Only one in four teams report smooth workflows as AI adoption, brittle systems, and tooling misalignment drive backend complexity

Temporal Technologies, the creators of the open source Durable Execution platform Temporal.io and the enterprise-grade managed service Temporal Cloud, today released the first edition of its State of Development Report, an annual survey exploring how development teams build and operate complex software systems.

Based on a survey of over 220 backend engineers and decision makers worldwide, the report examines the tools, workflows, and challenges shaping development in modern infrastructure environments.

The data points to growing operational strain and rising complexity as teams embrace AI, long-running systems, and multi-layered workflows. Only one in four respondents say their workflows operate smoothly, while others cite high overhead, brittle processes, and recovery issues that consume valuable engineering time and slow teams down. Other key findings include:

• AI adoption is widespread, but most teams lack the infrastructure to support it. 94% of respondents report using AI tools like GitHub Copilot or ChatGPT in their workflows, but only 39% say they’ve built reliable frameworks to support AI at scale.
• Workflow fragility is the norm. 75% of teams say that their workflows are hampered by issues such as insufficient support for long-running processes (35%), high operational overhead (35%), and failure recovery challenges (34%).
• Reliability beats cost, performance, and speed. 36% of engineers and leaders say that reliability and compliance are their top development priorities over the next 12–24 months, which are higher than automation (33%) and reducing technical debt (30%).
• As companies scale, orchestration becomes more fragmented. Nearly half (49%) of large companies rely on custom-built workflow solutions, compared to just 33% of smaller organizations—leading to more brittle systems and growing operational complexity.
• Tooling priorities and decision-making power remain misaligned. In smaller companies, developers typically lead tooling decisions (50%), while in enterprises, that responsibility shifts to IT managers and CIOs (53%). ICs care most about performance and observability, while decision-makers prioritize reliability and cost.
• System failures come with real business risks. 48% of decision-makers cite customer churn as their biggest concern during outages. Another 47% say downtime drives up operational costs. Just 5% say that failures would have “no major impact.”

“The report tells us a lot of what we hear from partners every day—backend challenges aren’t just technical, they’re also organizational,” said Samar Abbas, co-founder and CEO of Temporal Technologies. “Engineers and decision makers are prioritizing different things, and that disconnect is driving tooling delays, reliability risks, and rising complexity across the stack. AI is only adding another layer of scale and unpredictability.”

The survey was conducted in Q2 2025 and includes responses from over 220 software engineers, architects, infrastructure contributors, and engineering leaders worldwide. Respondents represented a mix of company sizes and roles, including both individual contributors and senior decision-makers such as VPs, CTOs, and CIOs.

The full State of Development Report 2025 is available here: https://temporal.io/pages/state-of-development-2025.

About Temporal Technologies:

Temporal is changing how modern software is built through its open-source Durable Execution platform. By guaranteeing the execution of complex workflows even in the face of system failures, Temporal allows developers to focus entirely on business logic rather than infrastructure complexities—increasing developer velocity. Its polyglot capabilities allow seamless orchestration across multiple programming languages, making it ideal for both traditional enterprise applications and next-generation AI workloads. Temporal Cloud, the company's managed service backed by the originators of the project, has been adopted by thousands of leading enterprises. Learn more at www.temporal.io.

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