- 58% use AI to write code daily/often/sometimes, but 28% never use it at all.
- Many do not trust the results and think that AI-generated content could be incorrect
- GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT are the most popular tools, Claude is moving up
The latest annual global C++ developer survey has revealed that many programmers are actually rapidly increasing their use of AI; However, overall trust in technology remains low.
The data showed that writing code and testing are the most common use cases for AI, while debugging, code review, and identifying performance issues are a lower priority, implying that AI tools are being used as a first step and human supervision remains crucial.
However, while many developers use these platforms in these use cases a couple of times a week, many still report never using AI at all.
Developers are not ready to fully trust AI
For example, about 58% of developers use AI to write code “almost every day”, “often” or “sometimes”, 14% use it “rarely”, and 28% never use it.
While adoption, or at least experimentation, is growing, there are still some concerns at play. More than three in four (78%) are concerned that AI-generated content is incorrect: lack of confidence in the result (70%), poor understanding of relevant context (51%) and data privacy concerns (50%) are also among the most popular setbacks. Many also oppose AI on ethical and environmental grounds, particularly as tech companies continue to eliminate jobs that are seeing the biggest productivity gains from AI.
When responding to where AI is good and where it is not so good, the 1,400+ respondents overall felt that AI lacks safety-critical code, architecture-level decisions, and highly contextual debugging in large, complex C++ projects. However, it is proving successful in understanding legacy or unknown code.
GitHub Copilot remains the most used code-specific AI tool (53%), but Claude Code (44%) is gaining market share. OpenAI’s Codex (14%) is much less popular; However, ChatGPT (53%) leads the way in terms of general-purpose AI support, with Gemini (39%) and Claude Chat (30%) falling behind.
From usage patterns alone, it seems that developers are interested in using AI as a support tool and not as a replacement, but AI also has a long way to go to prove itself in programming, where a simple mistake could create a major security issue.
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