The 2026 State of Web Dev AI survey, conducted by Sacha Greif between April 8 and May 8, is out with data from 7,258 developers. The headline finding: the average share of code respondents describe as AI-generated jumped from 28 percent in 2025 to 56 percent this year, with the highest growth in the segment reporting more than 75 percent AI-written output. The share of developers who said they use AI tools constantly also doubled year over year.
On the tooling side, Claude is the model developers pay for most, ahead of ChatGPT despite ChatGPT’s broader name recognition. The survey also recorded a clear rise in monthly AI spending per respondent, which Greif attributes to labs beginning to unwind the subsidized pricing that early adoption was built on.
Developer-survey data is one of the few grounded counterweights to vendor adoption claims, because it samples practitioners rather than buyers or press releases. The participation figures here, while subject to the selection bias Greif openly flags, are large enough to treat as directionally meaningful.
Anyone making tooling or hiring decisions in the next quarter should treat this dataset as a baseline reference worth bookmarking.
Published by the State of Web Dev AI survey at stateofai.dev, conducted by Sacha Greif from April 8 to May 8, 2026.
