You might have seen the State of JavaScript survey before, but did you know there's now a State of Web Dev AI survey as well?

I just published the results, and the data revealed quite a few interesting trends.

The AI Takeover is Here

A few years ago, NFTs (remember them?) were all you'd hear about. But that technology had very little practical use, and once the hype wore out it wasn't long before the world more or less forgot about it.

It seemed at first like AI might follow the same path, with many dismissing LLMs as "fancy autocorrect" and predicting an eventual return to the statu quo.

But it should be clear by now that AI is anything but a flash in the pan, and the survey data confirms it.

For example, the proportion of code generated by AI tools has jumped from 28% in 2025 to 54% this year:

It's especially striking to see that the segment of respondents who use AI to produce nearly all of their code is now the single largest bucket–when it was the second smallest last year!

The frequency at which developers reach for AI tools has also increased drastically, with developers reporting they use AI “constantly” going from 11% to 21%.

All those signs point in the same direction: not only is AI usage increasing, but it's doing so at a speed rarely seen before when it comes to adopting new workflows.

The Claude Code Connection

So what's behind this shift? While it's impossible to prove any causal link with survey data alone, one factor worth considering is the growing impact of Claude Code, and agentic coding in general.

Claude Code is the most-loved coding assistant:

And in terms of raw usage, Claude Code is second behind GitHub Copilot with 62.9% of respondents having used it–while OpenAi Codex comes in a distant third with only 34.5%.

But more crucially, both Claude and Claude Code top the ranks of tools developers are actually paying for:

Anthropic likes to position itself as the underdog fighting against OpenAI's dominance, but these results indicate that when it comes to developers at least, OpenAI is the one fighting an uphill battle.

A Threat to Developers

So it looks like developers are embracing their new AI overlords en masse, and the few lone voices warning us about Skynet can probably be dismissed as delusional crackpots, right?

Well… not so fast. While it's true that developers tend to be more concerned with the next line of codes than with doomsday predictions, it doesn't mean they're blind to the very real issues created by this sudden AI surge.

For starters, developers are quite conscious of the fact that their jobs may now be threatened by the very machines they helped train, as is becoming apparent in the recent Meta layoffs:

And as a commenter astutely pointed out, even if AI can't do your job, all you need to be fired is that your boss thinks it can.

But while job loss tops the list of AI issues developers worry about, it isn't the only one by any means:

Military use of AI scored quite high as well, which makes sense since the survey was filled out at a time when the Pentagon's use of AI was in the news.

And of course, AI's environmental impact is another very real worry, with the construction and operation of new datacenters putting extra stress on an already-struggling planet.

Preparing for an AI Future

Taken together, these survey results point a nuanced picture: yes, developers have embraced AI and its productivity gains–but they're also quite aware of the risks and issues presented by AI adoption, and many of them aren't quite convinced that the juice is worth the squeeze.

Believe it or not, this is only a tiny fraction of the data collected, and I encourage you to check out the full survey results to get a broader picture of the AI developer ecosystem in 2026, as well as read the conclusion by the one and only Primeagen.

And hey–if you'd like to brush up on your CSS knowledge one last time before Claude Code takes your job, why not go fill out this year's State of CSS survey and see how many new CSS features you know?