JetBrains has published the second wave of its AI Pulse survey, polling over 10,000 professional developers worldwide in January 2026 across eight languages. The results paint a definitive picture of the AI coding tools landscape: 90% of developers now regularly use at least one AI tool at work, and 74% have adopted specialised AI coding assistants — up dramatically from previous waves.
The headline finding is Claude Code's trajectory. Work adoption has grown 6x in nine months — from roughly 3% in mid-2025 to 18% by January 2026, now level with Cursor. In the US and Canada, adoption is even higher at 24%. More striking than the raw numbers are the loyalty metrics: Claude Code leads the market with 91% customer satisfaction (CSAT) and a net promoter score of 54, meaning users are not just adopting it but actively recommending it to colleagues. GitHub Copilot remains the most widely known tool at 76% awareness and 29% work usage, but the momentum clearly favours performance-focused agents over platform-integrated tools.
The survey also captured the rise of Google Antigravity, a new AI code editor launched in November 2025 that reached 6% adoption within just two months. Meanwhile, JetBrains' own AI tools — AI Assistant (9%) and Junie (5%) — are carving out meaningful share. On the chatbot side, 28% of developers use ChatGPT for coding tasks at work, followed by Gemini at 8% and Claude's chatbot at 7%.
For context engineers, this data confirms what many in the COR community have experienced firsthand: the AI coding tools market has shifted from a Copilot monopoly to a multi-tool ecosystem where developers layer different tools for different tasks. The most common stack in 2026 is Cursor for daily editing plus Claude Code for complex tasks, or Copilot in your IDE plus Claude Code in your terminal. The era of one tool to rule them all is over.
