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

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.

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.

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.)