GitHub survey: 92% of US programmers are using AI tools

GitHub partnered with Wakefield Research to survey 500 US enterprise developers. Focuses on areas such as developer productivity, team collaboration, and the role of AI in enterprise environments.

Key Findings:

• 92% of U.S. developers already use AI coding tools at work and outside of work.
• Despite the industry-wide investment in DevOps, developers still say that besides writing code, the most time-consuming thing they do on the job is wait for builds and tests. Developers want to improve skills, design solutions, get feedback from end users and evaluate their communication skills. However, build and test wait times, and the current performance metrics they measure against, are becoming an obstacle.
• Developers in an enterprise environment work on projects with an average of 21 other engineers. Developers believe that their ability to collaborate with others and the quality of their code (rather than the quantity and efficiency of output) should be their primary performance indicators.
• More than four in five developers expect AI coding tools to make their teams more collaborative.
• 70% said AI coding tools would give them an edge on the job, citing better code quality, time to completion, and resolution of incidents as some of the most important expected benefits.

Specifically, nearly all (92%) developers use AI coding tools at work, and a majority (67%) use these tools both in their work environment and in their personal time. 

Six percent of developers said they only use these tools outside of work.

Findings suggest that it’s not just interest but acceptance of these AI tools that leads developers to use AI. 

Developers believe that AI coding tools can help them meet existing performance standards, improve code quality, speed up output, and reduce production-grade incidents.

About one-third of developers report that their performance is currently assessed based on the amount of code written. 

In addition to improving individual performance, more than four in five developers surveyed (81%) said AI coding tools would help enhance collaboration within their teams and organizations. and believe that AI coding tools will allow them more time to focus on solution design; this will have direct organizational benefits, meaning developers believe they will spend more time designing new features and products using AI, rather than writing boilerplate code .

Fifty-seven percent of developers surveyed said that using AI coding tools helped them develop programming language skills, which they cited as the top benefit of using these AI applications (the second benefit was increased productivity). 

This suggests that developers see using AI coding tools as a way to improve their skills while on the job, rather than adding another task to their workday to learn and develop.

More details can be found in the full report .