JetBrains has published the latest wave of its Developer Ecosystem Survey — now in its tenth year, over 15,000 professional developers worldwide — and the AI coding tool numbers have moved further and faster than anyone tracking the space expected. Claude Code’s work usage rose from 18% in January 2026 to 39% by the May–July wave, while GitHub Copilot fell from 29% to 21% over the same stretch. Claude Code is now the single most-used tool for 31% of developers surveyed — roughly an 80% conversion rate from “uses it at work” to “it’s my main tool,” a stickiness figure well ahead of anything else measured.
We covered an earlier wave of this same JetBrains data in July, when Claude Code and Cursor were still level at 18% and Copilot held a clear lead at 29%. What’s changed in the few months since is the headline result itself: Copilot has now lost the top spot it held through most of Copilot’s dominance of the category, and Claude Code isn’t just catching up, it’s pulling ahead by a wide and growing margin. That’s a different story to “AI coding tools are popular” — it’s a specific, dated market-share reversal, the kind that should update any assumption a team baked into its tooling decisions six months ago.
So what
If your team, or a development partner you’re evaluating, standardised on GitHub Copilot as the default AI coding tool earlier in 2026, this is worth revisiting — the market has moved since that decision was made, and the tool with the strongest current adoption and loyalty numbers has changed. We use Claude Code as part of our day-to-day delivery process; see how that fits into our build approach on AI-assisted development, or get in touch to talk through your team’s tooling.