Stack Overflow 2026 Developer Survey finds Claude Code at 66 percent and GitHub Copilot at 59 percent among 30,903 responding developers

A team picking a coding assistant now has a current reading of which tools 30,903 working developers actually open each day. Stack Overflow published the 2026 edition of its Developer Survey on 6 October, after collecting answers from 169 countries over seven weeks. It is the sixteenth annual run of the survey.

The headline is that AI use has become routine. Stack Overflow reports that 80 percent of respondents used an AI tool for at least an hour per day in their work this year, and 73 percent of the respondents who use AI coding assistants or agents reach for them daily. Among those daily users, one in three spends four or more hours per day using any AI tool.

Which tools people are actually in

Stack Overflow reports that the two most-used coding agents are Claude Code at 66 percent and GitHub Copilot at 59 percent. By tool category, coding agents are used by 66 percent of AI users and chatbots by 63 percent.

On model providers, Stack Overflow says Anthropic and OpenAI sit at close usage levels at the top, with Google well behind in third. More respondents say they want to keep using Anthropic models than OpenAI models, though the gap is small.

What people trust AI to do

Trust in AI output moved sharply in one year. Stack Overflow reports that 87 percent of respondents now have some level of trust in AI's outputs, up from 31 percent in the 2025 survey. The trust is conditional: 48 percent say they trust AI only on low-risk, easily verifiable tasks. 12 percent say they do not trust it for most tasks.

The jobs developers actually hand to AI reflect that. The survey reports AI is used primarily for generating code in familiar areas (67 percent) and debugging (61 percent). It is used for deploying, operating or troubleshooting production systems by only 20 percent. 62 percent of respondents view AI tools favorably in their work, and 71 percent of daily users do.

Where Stack Overflow itself fits now

The survey confirms what the site has been measuring in its own traffic. 64 percent of respondents say they visit Stack Overflow less for simple questions because of AI, and 29 percent ask fewer questions overall. Only 16 percent say they visit more to check the source of information behind an AI answer.

When developers do look for a trusted answer at work, humans still come first: 72 percent name coworkers or teammates, 63 percent name the code and comments, and 60 percent name internal documentation. 93 percent say citing sources is key to trusting an AI answer.

For a team deciding where its next coding-assistant seat goes, or how much to spend on a yearly subscription, the survey is one of the only cross-industry readings available. The 2026 edition covers 467 technologies and the full results, including the methodology and tables of answers, are on Stack Overflow's survey site. A one-page overview and the download link to the raw data (released later) are on the same page.

Source

Stack Overflow blog: The results of the 2026 Developer Survey are here!, 6 October 2026, linking to the full survey at survey.stackoverflow.co/2026.