Surveys
Stack Overflow 2026: agents in, production off-limits
66% of developers use coding agents, but only 20% let AI touch production operations.
Stack Overflow's annual survey, published on 6 October 2026 with more than 30,000 respondents, confirms that AI has become an everyday tool: 73% of AI tool users use it every day.
A clear trust boundary
Usage centres on generating code in familiar areas (67%) and debugging (61%). AI is involved in production operations only 20% of the time.
Trust depends on traceability: 93% of developers require source attribution to trust an answer.
Claude Code ahead of Copilot among agent users
Among those who use agents, Claude Code is cited by 66% of respondents and GitHub Copilot by 59%.
Costs under watch
Organisations are governing costs: 38% cap usage and 27% route requests across several models.
Source: Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2026.