Software developers are warming to chatbots over specific coding tools
If you work in software development and are afraid that AI is coming for your job, then fear not. Recent studies suggest coding assistants are less popular than expected.
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The recent Stack Overflow survey, which covered around 60,000 developers globally, found that although the use of AI technologies is rising, the hype is around chatbots rather than coding assistants.
For example, StackOverflow says coding companion CoPilot, saw a 12 percentage point decline in usage among professional developer respondents, from 56% to 44% between 2023 and 2024. Rival coding assistant Tabnine saw its market share fall from 12% to 5%.
ChatGPT is still used by four in five developers, but it's the usage of bots that's really going through the roof. Gemini (formerly Google Bard), more than doubled its popularity to 22%. Claude, Anthropic's chatbot, was not featured on the last survey but is now used by 7.6% of professional developers. The average developer seems to use at least two chatbots.
Over four in five developers also use AI to code, although the percentage of people doing so fell marginally in the past year. The implication seems to be that the main AI chatbots are becoming so efficient that even specialized technologies can't beat them.
In software forum Stack Overflow's 2024 developer survey, it noted that AI tool usage rose from 70% of respondents to 76%. Despite professions that AI is the future of coding, coding companions in particular are losing popularity
76% of professional developers said AI will be more integrated into their workflow next year, but that doesn't mean their jobs will become any easier. A recent study by Forbes found that 77% of employees said AI added to their workflow and made it more difficult to reach expected levels of productivity. A popular online response noted that AI might reduce the amount of time coding significantly, but the hidden cost of debugging poor code can be great, and tedious.
Stack Overflow's qualitative responses backed this up; while 82% of professional respondents said using AI made them more efficient, just 24% said it made their workloads more manageable.
For software development jobs in finance, then, employer can play a key role in those expectations. JPMorgan has put a lot of eggs in its AI basket, UBS has said coding is a stranded asset, and Barclays MDs have suggested implementing AI can reduce developer demand by 88%. Goldman Sachs on the other hand has suggested in recent weeks that AI is a little overhyped.
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