42% of developers now say ai writes at least half their code, and 78% of ctos increased spending on…
42% of developers now say ai writes at least half their code, and 78% of ctos increased spending on review and qa to keep up. the hours ai saved came back as review hours.
the delegate-to-verify ratio is the new productivity metric.
Context
BairesDev's Dev Barometer Q3 2026, fielded in August 2026, surveyed 705 software developers across more than 60 countries and 41 enterprise CTOs. It reports 42% of developers say at least half their code is now assisted by AI tools, up from 12% in Q3 2025, and 78% of the 41 CTOs say they increased investment in code review, QA or validation over the past 12 months. It says developers report saving an average of 13 hours a week on coding and that review and validation absorb a growing share of hours.
BairesDev is a software services vendor, so this is a vendor-run survey, not independent, and the 42% is self-reported by the 705 developers surveyed, not all developers. The 78% is of 41 CTOs, about 32 people, a separate and much smaller base. The data deck's wording, read on 4 October 2026, is 42% of developers report that at least half of their code is now assisted by AI tools, so this is assisted, not written by AI, and it is self-reported. That the hours AI saved came back as review hours is the author's reading.
Related work
Watch next
- The data deck for the exact question wording.
Sources
- Dev Barometer Q3 2026 (BairesDev)bairesdev.com
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 18 September 2026 at 08:16 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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