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AI Coding Tools: Claude Code Leads, Codex Overtakes Cursor (JetBrains Survey)

The race in AI coding tools has moved from autocomplete to agents you hand work to, and the ranking has shifted a lot.

JetBrains surveyed more than 15,000 professional developers in May–July 2026. The share who use each tool at work: Claude Code 39%, GitHub Copilot 21%, OpenAI Codex 16%, Cursor 12%. Compared with January, Claude Code more than doubled from 18%, Codex grew more than fivefold from 3%, and Cursor fell from 18% to 12%.

An agent here means an AI that goes beyond finishing code line by line: it reads the whole project and works through several steps on its own.

Survey results

Tool January May–July
Claude Code 18% 39% (U.S.: 47%)
GitHub Copilot (29% a year earlier) 21%
OpenAI Codex 3% 16%
Cursor 18% 12%
OpenCode – 7%
Google Antigravity – 6%
  • When asked for the single tool they use most, 31% of developers named Claude Code, the highest of any tool.
  • Awareness was equal for Copilot and Claude Code at 79%. Codex jumped from 27% to 65%.
  • 90% of developers use AI coding tools at least weekly and 68% use them daily. Most people use several tools, so the percentages add up to more than 100%.

This is a JetBrains survey, so JetBrains users may be over-represented. Results were weighted by region, employment type and language, but other surveys may show different numbers.

Where Codex stands

OpenAI reportedly said Codex had 5 million weekly active users as of June 2, up from 2 million in March and 3 million in April. That number covers the whole Codex product, and companies count “users” differently, so it can’t be compared directly with survey percentages. Anthropic only said Claude Code’s weekly active users had doubled since January and has not published an absolute number.

Revenue run rates

Annualized recurring revenue (ARR) takes the most recent month or two of revenue and scales it to a year. It is not the same as real yearly revenue.

  • Claude Code: reported at more than $2.5 billion as of February 2026, according to Anthropic’s own funding announcement on Feb. 12.
  • Cursor: Bloomberg reported on March 2 that it passed $2 billion in February, and on May 21 reported about $3 billion as of late April. Both figures rely on anonymous sources.

The figures come from different dates and sources, so they are hard to compare directly.

Windsurf is now Devin Desktop

On June 2, Cognition renamed Windsurf Devin Desktop. According to Cognition’s FAQ, existing users move over through a regular update and plans and pricing stay the same. The main screen shifted from a code editor to a view for managing local and cloud agents. The old agent, Cascade, stayed available through July (the FAQ gives no exact end date) and was then replaced by Devin Local. Devin Desktop doesn’t appear as its own row in the JetBrains table.

What could change for developers

What follows is our estimate and advice based on the survey.

  • One tool won’t be enough. Many developers mix tools: hand a task to a terminal agent, then polish in an editor.
  • The way you work changes. Instead of getting help while you type, you hand off a task and review the result. Reading and judging code becomes more important.
  • Check how pricing works. An agent calls the AI many times for one task, so usage-based bills can grow faster than expected.
  • Give permissions narrowly. For tools that touch your terminal and files, limit which commands are allowed and which folders they can run in from the start.
  • Keep your options open. The ranking changed this much in half a year. If your team’s rules live only in one tool’s own settings, switching gets expensive, so keep coding rules in a document in the repository too.

What to watch

This year’s Stack Overflow and other surveys, official user numbers from Anthropic and OpenAI, and how users react to the Devin Desktop change.

Sources

Source: blog.jetbrains.com

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