Survey: 92 Percent of all Programmers Use AI Tools
AI tools don’t just increase productivity. According to developers, they also improve code quality.
In the U.S., 92 percent of all programmers have already used AI tools to create code. That’s the result of a survey conducted by Wakefield Research on behalf of GitHub. Of the 500 participants, 70 percent said they expect AI to bring significant benefits to their code.
Most notably, AI tools can help developers meet existing performance standards through better code quality, faster output and fewer production-level incidents, according to the survey. But they are also turning to AI tools to simply produce more lines of code.
AI tools are becoming the standard
Only enterprise developers were surveyed. And only 6 percent of participants said they use AI tools exclusively outside the workplace. So the study suggests that artificial intelligence programming tools are now an integral part of modern enterprise IT.
“Development leaders need to ask themselves if measuring code volume is still the best way to measure productivity and performance,” Inbal Shani, chief product officer at GitHub, commented on the study’s findings. “The answer is no. Ultimately, the path to innovation at scale is to empower developers, improve their productivity, increase their satisfaction and enable them to do their best work – every day.”
According to the survey, “Developers want to educate themselves, design solutions, get feedback from end users, and be evaluated on their communication skills.” Developers believe they should be judged on how they handle bugs and problems. This aligns with the belief that code quality over code quantity should remain the most important performance metric.
Developers also expect that AI coding tools will give them more time to develop new features and products rather than writing standard code. The survey also shows that programmers are already using generative AI coding tools to automate parts of their workflow. This also leaves more time for collaborative projects such as security reviews, planning and pair programming.
