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👋 Hi, this is Gergely with a subscriber-only issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover challenges at Big Tech and startups through the lens of engineering managers and senior engineers. If you’ve been forwarded this email, you can subscribe here.
AI Tooling for Software Engineers in 2026
Claude Code dominates tool usage, leaders are more positive about AI than engineers, staff+ engineers are the biggest users of AI agents, and more. Exclusive data and analysis from 900+ respondents
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Which AI tools are software engineers using, and what do they really think of them? We asked The Pragmatic Engineer subscribers, and nearly a thousand of you have shared your experiences of using AI tools for work. This article provides a high-level overview of those findings from our latest AI tooling survey. Thank you to everyone who participated!
There are plenty of interesting details, most notably, validation of just how much Anthropic and Claude Code have risen to dominate tooling usage. Claude Code is today nearly as widespread as GitHub Copilot was in our survey three years ago (in the spring of 2023) – which shows how fast the AI market moves.
In today’s issue, we cover:
Interesting findings: Claude Code has rocketed to #1 in just eight months, AI is fully mainstream with 95% weekly usage among respondents, and more.
Most-used AI tools: Claude Code leads the pack, followed by chatbots and GitHub Copilot. Cursor’s rising fast, and newcomers like Codex and Antigravity are gaining traction. Most engineers juggle two to four tools at once.
Popular models: Anthropic’s Opus and Sonnet models dominate coding tasks by a wide margin, with more mentions than all others combined.
AI trends: mainstream adoption achieved. 95% of respondents report using AI tools at least weekly, 75% use AI for half or more of their work, and 56% report doing 70%+ of their engineering work with AI.
AI agent usage rising: 55% of respondents now regularly use AI agents, with staff+ engineers leading adoption on 63.5% usage in the survey results. Agent users are twice as excited about AI as non-users are.
Company size and tool usage: smaller places overwhelmingly favor Claude Code (75% at the tiniest businesses), while large enterprises default to GitHub Copilot. This popularity is probably down to enterprise procurement preferences – and Microsoft’s enterprise marketing efforts.
Tools engineers love: Claude Code is the most loved tool at 46%, far ahead of Cursor on 19% and GitHub Copilot at 9%. Senior leaders are especially enthusiastic about Claude Code.
Demographics: Overview of who took part in the survey.
Full subscribers also have access to a longer, 35-page report with additional details - linked at the end of this article.
The bottom of this article could be cut off in some email clients. Read the full article uninterrupted, online.
1. Interesting findings
Here are my ten personal, most-interesting findings from this survey:
Claude Code has gone from zero to be the #1 tool in only eight months. Released in May 2025, it’s already the most-used AI coding tool, overtaking GitHub Copilot and Cursor.
AI is now mainstream. 95% of respondents use AI tools at least weekly, or more often, and 75% use AI for at least half their software engineering work. Among readers of The Pragmatic Engineer, it seems the question is no longer whether to use AI in day-to-day work, but which tools to use.
Cursor is catching up fast on GitHub Copilot. As much as we hear about companies dropping Cursor for Claude Code, Cursor is doing more than fine, growing in mentions 35% since our previous survey nine months ago.
Most engineers juggle multiple AI tools. 70% use between two and four tools simultaneously, while 15% use five or more.
Staff+ engineers are the heaviest agent users. 63.5% use agents regularly; more than regular engineers (49.7%), engineering managers (46.1%), and directors/VPs (51.9%).
Codex is seeing explosive early growth. Despite not existing during the last survey, OpenAI’s Codex already has 60% of Cursor’s usage (!!)
Using agents correlates strongly with being positive about AI. People using agents are nearly twice as likely to feel excited about AI while non-users are twice as likely to be skeptical.
Company size influences tool choice more than preference. Huge companies (10K+) more likely to use Copilot (56%), tiny startups mostly go with Claude Code (75%) and Cursor (42%). It seems like enterprise procurement, not individual preference, is behind this divergence.
A tight chatbot race. ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude as standalone chatbots have nearly equal numbers of mentions, suggesting there’s no clear winner outside of coding-specific tools among software engineers.
Directors and senior leaders are especially into Claude Code. The survey finds this tool is twice as popular with these folks as it is at less senior levels, while Cursor gets less love as seniority increases.
Let’s jump into some of the data:
2. Most-used AI tools
Just eight months after its release, Claude Code is already the most-used tool, overtaking both GitHub Copilot and Cursor: