AI Tooling for Software Engineers in 2026

The Pragmatic Engineer surveyed over 900 subscribers between late January and mid-February 2026 on which AI tools they use for software engineering, and how they feel about them. Claude Code, released in May 2025, overtook both GitHub Copilot and Cursor in eight months and now leads in overall usage, adoption growth, and how much engineers say they love it.

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• 95% of respondents use AI tools at least weekly, and 56% report doing 70% or more of their engineering work with AI; only 2.1% report no usage at all.
• Claude Code leads overall usage and is especially dominant at the smallest companies (75% adoption), while GitHub Copilot overtakes it at large enterprises. The survey attributes this to procurement preference and Microsoft’s enterprise bundling rather than individual choice.
• Cursor grew about 35% in mentions over nine months and is closing in on GitHub Copilot, while OpenAI’s Codex, unavailable during the prior survey, already reaches 60% of Cursor’s usage.
• 55% of respondents regularly use AI agents, up sharply from the prior survey; staff+ engineers lead adoption at 63.5%, ahead of engineering managers and directors.
• Regular agent users are nearly twice as likely to feel positive about AI (61% versus 36%) and half as likely to feel skeptical, which the survey frames as correlation rather than settled causation.
• Anthropic’s Opus and Sonnet models combined outrank every other model mentioned for coding tasks; about one in eight respondents simply use whatever model their company defaults to.
• Claude Code is loved most by senior leadership, twice as popular among directors as among line engineers, while Cursor’s love declines with seniority, and both decline somewhat as company size grows.