The state of developer stacks, Q3 2026
Download the data (CSV)Tools in this post
Claude Code was the most-used AI coding agent of Q3 2026 in both large developer surveys fielded in the quarter. 65.5% of the 12,255 people who answered the coding agent question in the Stack Overflow 2026 survey (fieldwork 23 June to 5 August 2026) used it, and so did 39% of 15,509 professional developers at work in JetBrains' May-July 2026 wave, up from 3% a year earlier. Between 1 July and 30 September 2026 Claude Code also gained the most VS Code Marketplace installs (+38.4%), while OpenAI Codex grew fastest on GitHub (+35.2% stars) and npm (+112% downloads per day).
Five findings for the quarter, 1 July to 30 September 2026:
Claude Code ranked first among coding agents in both surveys, ahead of GitHub Copilot (58.7% and 21%).
Codex's repository went from 94,076 to 127,213 stars, and its VS Code extension from 11.0 million to 14.9 million installs.
Copilot's vendor and survey numbers split: Microsoft reported 50 million users on 29 July, while JetBrains measured at-work use falling from 29% to 21% in a year.
Cursor slipped in both surveys in the quarter SpaceX closed its acquisition, from 17.9% to 14.9% in Stack Overflow's IDE question.
Outside AI, Drizzle (+113%) and Vitest (+62%) grew several times faster on npm than Prisma (+43%) and Jest (+10%).
This is the first quarterly edition. Stackness profiles are still a small sample, so it leans on public sources: two surveys, npm, PyPI, the VS Code Marketplace and GitHub, each labelled as self-reported or measured. Stackness numbers get their own section, with the sample size stated.
The AI coding agents developers used in Q3 2026
Claude Code, GitHub Copilot and OpenAI Codex were the three most-used AI coding agents in Q3 2026 in both the Stack Overflow 2026 survey and JetBrains' May-July 2026 wave. The two surveys ask different questions, so their levels differ: Stack Overflow counts past-year use among people who answered its agent question, JetBrains counts use at work across all professional developers. The order of the top three agrees.
Tool | Stack Overflow 2026, used in past year (n=12,255) | JetBrains, at work, May-Jul 2026 (N=15,509) | JetBrains, Apr-Jun 2025 | VS Code installs, Q3 change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
65.5% | 39% | 3% | +38.4% | |
58.7% | 21% | 29% | +3.2% (Copilot Chat) | |
29.5% | 16% | 0% | +35.8% | |
25.5% | 12% | 12% | not on the Marketplace | |
16.0% | 6% | not asked | not counted | |
13.6% | 7% | not asked | not counted | |
4.5% | not listed | not listed | +21.6% |
Survey figures are self-reported. Install figures are measured, from Wayback Machine snapshots of each Marketplace page within three days of 1 July and 30 September. An install is an event, not a person: the counter includes reinstalls and new machines and never goes down. Claude Code went from 19,278,058 to 26,682,153 installs, Copilot Chat from 76,122,820 to 78,533,720. More AI tools, ranked by Stackness profiles, are on the AI tools hub.
Chart by Stackness from the figures in AI Coding Agents: Adoption Trends by JetBrains, 19 August 2026.
OpenAI Codex grew fastest on GitHub and npm
OpenAI Codex had the largest Q3 2026 gain of any coding agent on GitHub and npm. The openai/codex repository rose 35.2% to 127,213 stars, the largest gain among the agent repositories I checked, and npm downloads of @openai/codex per reporting day rose 112% against Q2 once a seven-day spike from 30 April to 6 May is left out. Its VS Code extension rose 35.8% to 14,937,471 installs, second to Claude Code.
Chart by Stackness from VS Code Marketplace install counts and GitHub star counts read from Wayback Machine snapshots of 1 July and 30 September 2026.
That spike reached 45,984,321 downloads on 2 May against about one million on a normal day, which looks like automated traffic; with it included, Q2 looks larger than Q3. JetBrains saw the same rise: Codex at work went from 3% in January 2026 to 16% in May-July.
OpenAI's own numbers are harder to use. The last Codex-only figure is "more than 5 million people use Codex every week" on 9 July 2026, in the post that brought Codex into the ChatGPT desktop app. Every later figure counts Codex and ChatGPT Work together, mostly without a time window, so I do not chart them as one series.
GitHub Copilot's vendor numbers and survey numbers point opposite ways
GitHub Copilot is the one large tool whose Q3 2026 numbers disagree with each other. Microsoft said on 29 July 2026 that Copilot has 50 million users and that its revenue grew more than 60% quarter over quarter. JetBrains measured at-work use falling from 29% to 21% over the year, and Copilot Chat's Marketplace installs grew 3.2% in the quarter.
The figures measure different things. Microsoft did not define "users", and the revenue jump came in Copilot's first full quarter on usage-based billing, live since 1 June, so part of it is a pricing change. Copilot comes bundled with VS Code setups, so the Marketplace counter understates its use. The JetBrains survey is the only figure here that asks the same question of the same population every wave. JetBrains also sells competing AI tools and weights its results by familiarity with JetBrains products.
Cursor lost survey share in the quarter it changed owners
Cursor's share fell in both developer surveys fielded around Q3 2026: from 17.9% to 14.9% of Stack Overflow respondents in the IDE question between 2025 and 2026, and from 18% in January 2026 to 12% at work in JetBrains' May-July wave. The fall in China was steeper in the JetBrains data, from 28% to 16%. Neither survey says why.
SpaceX completed its acquisition of Cursor on 14 August 2026, announced in June as a $60 billion all-stock deal. On 28 August OpenAI said it would wind down its contract supplying models to Cursor, with a proposed shutoff on 12 November 2026. Cursor published no company-wide revenue or user number during the quarter. The Editor and IDE hub tracks how Cursor, VS Code and Zed sit in Stackness stacks.
Gemini CLI faded after Google moved its users to Antigravity
Gemini CLI shrank or stalled on every measured counter in Q3 2026 after Google retired it for most individual users. From 18 June 2026 it stopped serving requests for Google AI Pro, Ultra and free individual accounts, which were moved to the Antigravity CLI. npm downloads per day fell 39.6% against Q2, and the repository gained 1.4% in stars, the smallest gain among the agents I checked.
Google said on 22 July 2026 that Antigravity has more than 2.4 million weekly active users, a self-reported figure. In the surveys Antigravity reached 16.0% (Stack Overflow) and 6% at work (JetBrains, the same as in January).
Drizzle, Vitest and Ruff gained the most ground outside AI
Drizzle ORM, Vitest and Ruff made the largest Q3 2026 gains among the non-AI tools I measured, each growing several times faster than the tool it is most often compared with. Every npm package I pulled grew in Q3, Jest and ESLint included, so read each change against those two baselines.
Chart by Stackness from the npm downloads API, read 13 October 2026.
The AI building blocks grew in the same range: ai (Vercel AI SDK) by 72% to 3,223,798 downloads a day and @modelcontextprotocol/sdk by 48% to 7,536,123.
On PyPI, Ruff raised its share of a 13-package basket by 44.7% from June to September and the Anthropic SDK by 21.2%, while LangChain lost 32.7% of its share and LlamaIndex 52.1%. uv, FastAPI and Pydantic held steady. I use shares because almost every PyPI package dropped 25-35% from about 25 August, a break with no announced cause.
Stack Overflow's 2026 survey shows the same direction for editors and databases: Zed rose from 7.3% to 11.4%, VS Code fell from 75.9% to 70.9%, and SQLite (42.1%) passed MySQL (35.1%).
What Stackness profiles show for Q3 2026
Stackness profiles put Claude Code first among AI tools, like both surveys, but rank Cursor far above GitHub Copilot, unlike them. As of 1 October 2026, 22 real members had at least one public entry, after 24 bot accounts were excluded. Claude Code was on 7 of them, Cursor on 7 and GitHub on 9, the most-listed tool overall. Every count started the quarter at zero, so this is a first snapshot, not a trend.
Category | Members with a public entry | Most-listed tool (members) |
|---|---|---|
AI tools | 14 | |
Languages and frameworks | 14 | React, Tailwind CSS, TypeScript (7 each) |
DevOps and infrastructure | 13 | GitHub (9), Docker (8) |
Editor and IDE | 11 | Cursor (7), VS Code (5) |
Design and collaboration | 8 | Figma (6) |
LLMs | 5 | Claude Opus (4) |
The sample skews toward people building web apps with AI. Against the 2025 Stack Overflow survey, Claude Code is on 31.8% of Stackness profiles against 9.8% of survey respondents, and Supabase on 27.3% against 6.1%, while VS Code (22.7% against 76.4%), Python (18.2% against 58.1%) and Jira (18.2% against 46.8%) trail far behind. These 2025 shares are recomputed from Stack Overflow's public dataset, so they can differ by half a point from the 2025 results site. The most common pairs, each on 6 members, are GitHub with Docker, Next.js, React or Tailwind CSS, and Node.js with TypeScript.
Chart by Stackness from the quarterly export and the 2025 Stack Overflow survey dataset (ODbL); method on the data sources page.
The first departures arrived in September. Six members started Claude Code that month and one ended it; Cursor had six starts and no ends; Claude and ChatGPT each had one end. The September switching analysis had found none. No move collected three reactions in the quarter, so the moves table is empty. The live counts are on the trending page.
Q3 2026 events that changed stacks
Six Q3 2026 releases and deals changed what developers install or who owns it: TypeScript 7 rewritten in Go, Bun 1.4 rewritten in Rust, npm 12's safer install defaults, and three changes of ownership, Cursor to SpaceX, Hugging Face to NVIDIA (announced, not closed) and Tailwind Labs to Shopify.
Date | Event |
|---|---|
8 July | TypeScript 7.0 ships as a native Go port, "typically 8x-12x" faster full builds |
8 July | npm 12 turns dependency install scripts off by default |
14 August | SpaceX completes its acquisition of Cursor |
20 August | Bun 1.4 is rewritten from Zig to Rust |
3 September | NVIDIA agrees to buy Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, not yet closed |
9 September | Tailwind Labs joins Shopify; Tailwind CSS stays MIT licensed |
I found no licence change in a mainstream developer tool during the quarter. Cloudflare's acquisition of Deno, announced on 9 October, belongs to Q4.
How this report was counted
This report labels each number as one of three kinds. Survey answers are self-reported by respondents, vendor figures are self-reported by the company that sells the tool, and registry downloads, Marketplace installs and GitHub stars are measured but count machines and events, not people. Every external number links its source; all were read between 6 and 13 October 2026.
Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2026: 30,903 valid responses from 169 countries, collected 23 June to 5 August 2026, published 6 October. Each question has its own base, given in the tables. Many questions changed wording since 2025, so I compare years only where the question stayed the same. Survey data is licensed under the ODbL 1.0.
JetBrains AI coding agent adoption: 15,509 professional developers, May-July 2026, published 19 August. It mixes two survey programmes, so the waves are not one panel.
npm: the downloads API, Q2 against Q3 as the average per reporting day, because the API returned zero on seven days. Claude Code's docs now recommend a native installer over npm, so npm undercounts Claude Code.
PyPI: pypistats without mirrors, June against September, as a share of a 13-package basket.
VS Code Marketplace and GitHub stars: Wayback Machine snapshots within three days of each quarter edge. Stars measure attention and can be campaigned. The anthropics/claude-code repository is mostly an issue tracker, since the CLI ships as a binary.
Stackness: a read-only export of the production database as of 1 October 2026: public entries only, the 24 bot accounts removed, and any row under three members dropped so no one can be identified. Shares are members listing a tool divided by the 22 members with a public entry; the survey comparison uses the 2025 Stack Overflow survey, the newest one with a public dataset. The difference between organic profile data and imported history is on the data sources page.
Download the data
The Stackness tables behind this report are six CSV files, exported from a read-only snapshot of the production database as of 1 October 2026, with bots removed and every row under three members dropped:
usage-by-category.csv: members per category and the ten most-listed tools in each
top-movers-tools.csv: tools ranked by public entries added in the quarter
top-movers-moves.csv: moves ranked by reactions in the quarter (empty this quarter)
tool-pairs.csv: the 50 most common tool pairs on public stacks
ai-tools-adoption.csv: AI tool starts and ends per month
so-survey-comparison.csv: Stackness shares next to the 2025 Stack Overflow survey, with the ODbL attribution the survey data requires
Key numbers
65.5% of the 12,255 Stack Overflow 2026 respondents to the coding agent question used Claude Code, against 58.7% for GitHub Copilot (fieldwork 23 June to 5 August 2026, Stack Overflow).
39% of professional developers used Claude Code at work in May-July 2026, up from 3% a year earlier (JetBrains, N=15,509).
+38.4% VS Code Marketplace installs for Claude Code between 1 July and 30 September 2026, to 26,682,153, against +35.8% for OpenAI Codex (measured).
+35.2% GitHub stars for openai/codex in Q3 2026, to 127,213 (measured).
21% of professional developers used GitHub Copilot at work in May-July 2026, down from 29% a year earlier (JetBrains).
50 million GitHub Copilot users, as claimed by Microsoft on 29 July 2026 (self-reported, undefined).
14.9% of Stack Overflow 2026 respondents used Cursor as an editor, down from 17.9% in 2025.
+113% npm downloads per day for Drizzle ORM, Q3 against Q2 2026, against +43% for Prisma (measured).
-39.6% npm downloads per day for Gemini CLI, Q3 against Q2 2026, after Google moved its individual users to Antigravity (measured).
22 real Stackness members with a public entry as of 1 October 2026; Claude Code is on 31.8% of them, against 9.8% in the 2025 Stack Overflow survey (Stackness, self-reported).
Which of these do you use?
Nobody on Stackness runs Drizzle ORM yet. Tick what you use and be the first.
