Adoption

The JetBrains AI Pulse Survey from January 2026 is the most comprehensive developer AI usage dataset published this year, covering 24,534 developers across 183 countries. Its headline finding: 90% of developers now regularly use at least one AI tool at work. That figure marks a decisive shift from experimentation to infrastructure. AI coding tools are no longer a productivity experiment championed by early adopters — they are the default working environment for software development professionals worldwide, embedded in IDEs, code review pipelines, and CI workflows at scale. ...

Nine in ten developers now use at least one AI tool at work — a number that would have seemed implausible three years ago. The JetBrains Developer Ecosystem Survey from January 2026 puts overall adoption at 90%, with 74% having moved beyond general-purpose chatbots to adopt specialized coding assistants or agents. Trust, however, has not kept pace: only 29% of developers report trusting AI tool output, a collapse from over 70% in 2023. The gap between adoption and trust is the central tension defining the developer tooling landscape in 2026. ...