How Much Code Do Developers Really Let Agents Write? - The JetBrains Blog

JetBrains Research’s 2026 Developer Ecosystem Survey of more than 15,000 professional developers found that respondents estimated roughly 47% of their work code was fully generated by AI agents, 38% was written with AI assistance, and 27% was written manually, with totals affected by bucketed self-reporting. More than half of developers said they manually wrote under 20% of their code, although only about 22% relied on agents for over 80% of it. Senior developers were more likely than juniors to use highly agentic workflows, while Codex users reported the highest concentration of heavy agent use, ahead of Claude Code and Cursor users. Go, JavaScript, and TypeScript developers reported the largest average shares of agent-generated code, whereas C and C++ developers retained the greatest amount of manual coding, and developers in China, Japan, and South Korea showed substantially higher adoption of highly agentic workflows than those in Europe and the UK. The study grouped respondents into agentic coders, who comprised about 31% of developers and generated an average of 84% of their code through agents; AI-assisted coders, the largest group at 47%; and manual coders, 23% of respondents who still wrote most code themselves.

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