Ask HN: Estimating % of dev using coding assistants
6 points
11 hours ago
| 4 comments
| HN
Hello all, I discovered two months ago how helpful ai agents are. On HN, everyday, there are new articles about claude code or its friends. I feel like ''this is a very hot topic'', and happy to know a bit more everyday.

Yet, when i ask my collegues or friends, i feel very alone, where developpers are only asking a few questions to copilot, nothing more.

HN is a microcosm of geeks/early adopters. How is it around you ? Which percentage of people around you ''adopted'' coding agents ? Is there reluctancy to use AI ?

verdverm
11 hours ago
[-]
I've gone so far as to become frustrated with what I found in the open source options like Copilot and have been building my own custom extension, which is now better with gemini-3-flash than Copilot is with any model. Their prompt/context engineering is trash and their tools are not great
reply
evanmoran
7 hours ago
[-]
From what I've seen a ton of people are using Claude Code or Cursor daily. I wouldn't be surprised if most startups are at 100% use right now. The big tech companies are a bit slower, but have started rolling out almost unlimited token use so I wouldn't be surprised if they are above 50% adoption by the end of the year.

Start with Claude Code if you haven't tried it yet as it can edit your files directly and has some pretty fantastic skills/plugins that are quite interesting. (Copilot is quite a bit far behind unfortunately.)

reply
hireshbrem
9 hours ago
[-]
I'm young and seen people in high school and uni code. I will say i'm surprised with how many young people use it. they almost take it for granted. i have seen a rare luddite at a hackathon once, he just refused to use any ai coding tools. i'm starting to think people like that are just uncomfortable with change.
reply
JohnFen
8 hours ago
[-]
According to the stats my company produces, about 3% of the software developers here have used these tools more than twice. It's about the same percentage in amongst my developer friends not at my company, but that's a much smaller sample size.
reply