Tales from the 2026 Developer Survey results

Ryan Donovan (0:08)

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Hello and welcome to The Stack Overflow Podcast, a place to tuck all things software and technology. My name is Ryan Donovan, and today we are talking about the results of the 2026 Developer Survey. My guest for that is Erin Yepis. She is Market Research and Insights here at Stack Overflow.

Welcome back to the show, Erin.

Erin Yepis (0:56)

Thank you for having me.

Ryan Donovan (0:57)

Of course.

This is the 16th Developer Survey we've done, and I think it's the third one with AI on it. This year feels like the year that everybody standardizing using AI. I keep hearing people are not writing code anymore. What did we learn from the survey about AI this year?

Erin Yepis (1:19)

So it's actually the fourth year that we've had AI on the survey. And we have some continuity questions. This year we asked quite a few new questions as well, just in terms of where do you find impacts. We kind of tweaked some of the wording from last year. To be a little bit more specific, we asked also about whether anyone is avoiding using AI tools, and why, and also if anyone's building software with AI tools, whether they're building, and if they're switching AI tools, what caused the switch. Overall though, usage is still pretty high. We're at 83 percent.

It's actually just about the same as last year for usage.

Ryan Donovan (2:09)

Yeah. So you said 83 percent of developers use AI at work. How many of them are using it every day and how much every day?

Erin Yepis (2:18)

All right. So overall, we have 73 percent of users indicate they're using AI tools daily for a variety of reasons, mostly using them for AI coding assistance or general purpose AI chatbots.

Ryan Donovan (2:37)

And you mentioned AI agents. How many people are using AI agents?

Erin Yepis (2:43)

So we show, when we break it up, 66 percent of respondents indicated using AI agents, 63 percent general AI chatbots.

Ryan Donovan (2:56)

So some of what we do is kind of technology leaderboards, and the AI section has its own kind of technology leaderboards. Any surprises on whose top of the LLM or the AI agent leaderboards?

Erin Yepis (3:12)

Surprises, I would say no. We still see the frontier companies have most market share, the most usage amongst our respondents. We asked about a lot of different companies though. So in particular, I know I was interested to see how some of the open weights companies were doing. I looked at some comparisons for year over year values as well. They're staying steady, so they're not decreasing, they're not really increasing either.

Ryan Donovan (3:41)

Right. Yeah. I thought it was interesting that the top two, the Anthropic and OpenAIM models are both 74%. So there's a lot of crossover there. A lot of people using both.

Erin Yepis (3:52)

Yes.

Ryan Donovan (3:53)

So I think we've heard a lot about kind of tokenomics question. Are people, is the data reflecting that? Are people switching? Are people adjusting how they behave based on token costs?

Erin Yepis (4:07)

No. We asked about specifically if in our question about switching AI tools, if you have switched using tools in the past year, what made you switch? And people indicated that cost was part of that reason, but it was one of the lower ranked reasons. So only 6% indicated switching because of costs.

We also asked another question about specifically about tokens and if people limited themselves personally while using AI tools due to costs at work. And 33% indicated that they self-monitor their own usage, but we found out that 75% of people are changing their prompts for quality reasons. And then only 38% of users have indicated that they're changing their prompts due to cost.

Ryan Donovan (5:06)

Yeah, so we have a question about whether AI is making everybody productive, right? Like, is there some magic bullet tool? We looked at how many AI tools people use.

Is it narrowing how many tools they're using?

Erin Yepis (5:24)

Well, we haven't asked about how many AI tools people are using before in the Dev Survey. So we don't have anything to compare it to. We did ask last year how many software tools overall people are using. I know that was pretty high. On average, it was eight.