AI Coding Agents: Adoption Trends

Based on the Developer Ecosystem Survey 2026, the tenth edition of our large-scale, globally representative study run by the Strategic Research and Market Intelligence team.

This post picks up where our previous report on the adoption of the main AI coding tools left off in April 2026.

We recently ran the Developer Ecosystem Survey 2026 – a large-scale, globally representative survey of more than 15,000 professional developers worldwide, currently in its tenth year. This data provides a broad spectrum of insights into developers’ toolkits, practices, technologies, and attitudes.

We see AI coding agents actively carving out a place in developers’ toolkits, gaining traction and adoption across the industry. As of May–July 2026, 90% of professional developers were using AI coding agents at work at least weekly in one form or another (local agents or remote cloud agents), with 68% using them daily.

AI coding agents: Key adoption trends

Claude Code has continued to grow at an unprecedented pace, becoming by far the most widely adopted AI coding tool at work. It is used twice as often as GitHub Copilot, a former long-standing leader of the market that brought AI-assisted coding into the spotlight in 2023.

In May–July 2026, around 39% of professional developers worldwide were using Claude Code at work, up from 18% in January 2026. In the United States, its adoption is even higher at 47% – thus, almost half of US developers are using Claude Code at work. Moreover, it is becoming the main AI coding tool in developers’ AI toolkit at a much higher rate. Claude Code is the most used AI coding tool for 31% of developers, which signifies an almost 80% conversion rate (from regular usage at work to being the single most used tool).

Codex is rapidly catching up, showing adoption growth of roughly 5x, from just 3% in January 2026 to 16% in May–July 2026. However, the leap in product awareness might be even more impressive. In January 2026, only 27% of developers worldwide had heard about Codex despite the huge OpenAI brand behind it, while by May–July 2026 that number had risen to 65%.

GitHub Copilot has lost its leadership, experiencing a decline from 29% adoption a year ago to 21% in May–July 2026. However, it is still one of the most widely known tools on the market, with 79% mind share (awareness) among developers. This metric is even higher in Europe, the UK, and the US, sitting at 86%–90%. Also, according to the Developer Ecosystem Survey 2026, 39% of GitHub Copilot users use it, among other surfaces, in JetBrains IDEs.

Although Cursor has gained some mind share (from 69% in January to 75% in May–July), it has experienced a small decline in adoption, from 18% in January to 12% in May–July. The biggest drop in adoption occurred in China, where it was used by 28% developers in January and by only 16% in May–July 2026.

OpenCode – the open-source coding agent – has reached 7% adoption. Even more remarkably, it enjoys a 42% mindshare among developers worldwide without a big company name behind it.

Google Antigravity is stable in terms of adoption (6%) amid a significant leap in awareness: from 29% in January to 47% in May–July 2026. India is continuing to be Antigravity’s stronghold, where it is practically tied as the third most-popular AI coding tool, on par with Cursor: 15% of developers in India use Antigravity at work, up from 10% in January 2026.

JetBrains AI

As AI coding agents become a standard part of developers’ workflows, JetBrains AI are also seeing adoption, with around 9% of developers worldwide using JetBrains AI in IDEs and/or Junie at work.

Moreover, Claude Agent, Codex, GitHub Copilot, and OpenCode are integrated directly into the AI chat of JetBrains IDEs, and dozens of other agents, including Cursor, can be added via the Agent Client Protocol (ACP). You can even use Codex via your OpenAI API key or ChatGPT subscription.

JetBrains is also expanding its agentic ecosystem. Air – an agentic development environment currently in preview – lets developers combine multiple coding agents in one coherent workflow, while JetBrains Central provides a unified control and execution plane for managing agent-driven development across tools and environments.

You can learn more about JetBrains’ AI offerings for teams and organizations here.

We’re curious to see how the adoption of agentic software development evolves further, and we plan to share more of our findings on agentic development practices from the Developer Ecosystem Survey 2026 with the community soon. Stay tuned!

Methodology notes

In this report, “professional developers” refers to respondents who reported being involved in coding or programming in any of the following job roles:

Developer / Programmer / Software Engineer

AI / ML Engineer

DevOps Engineer / Infrastructure Developer

Architect

Data Scientist / Engineer / Analyst

QA Engineer

Roughly 90% of the sample falls into the Developer / Programmer / Software Engineer job category.

The Developer Ecosystem and AI Pulse surveys are localized into eight languages: English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, French, and Portuguese. We apply quotas on the required number of responses by region to help achieve accurate global representation. The quotas are proportionate to the number of developers in each region, based on estimates by our Data Science team. The detailed methodology of these estimates is described here.

The Developer Ecosystem Survey has been statistically reweighted to better represent the global developer population by region, employment status, programming language, and familiarity with JetBrains products. You can read about the weighting methodology for the Developer Ecosystem Survey here and for the AI Pulse survey here.