tlder@dev — Stack Overflow's 2026 survey: coding agents are now the norm
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Cross-Cutting/leadership, ai-ml, devtools

Stack Overflow's 2026 survey: coding agents are now the norm

  • Discussion

This is the survey the rest of the industry quotes for a year, and the headline is agents. Sixty-five percent of respondents now reach for a coding agent, with Claude Code (66%) and Copilot (59%) the two people actually use. Daily use is heavy: nearly three-quarters of AI users lean on the tools every day, and a third of those spend four-plus hours a day inside one. The sentiment numbers are messier, and more honest. Positive feeling about AI sits at 62% overall and 71% among daily users — up, but well short of unanimous, and a sizable share of agent users still say they avoid trusting the output. On models, Anthropic and OpenAI are neck and neck on usage, though more developers say they want to keep using Anthropic's. The non-AI findings reward a glance too. SQL edged past HTML/CSS for the number-two language spot, Rust climbed to twelfth, and the share of people working as a company of one jumped from 4% to 10%.