42% of developers say AI writes at least half of their code, up from 12% a year earlier

BairesDev's quarterly survey measures 13 hours saved per week on code, but 67% of respondents now spend more time reviewing what the machine produces.

The third-quarter 2026 Dev Barometer, released on September 15, covers 705 developers in more than 60 countries and 41 CTOs of Fortune 500 and mid-market companies. The figure that structures the report: 42% of developers say AI writes at least half of their code, compared to 12% in the same quarter a year earlier. Time saved on coding tasks is 13 hours per week, almost double the 7 hours measured in the third quarter of 2025.

But this freed up time does not return to writing code. Only 21% of respondents spend more than half of their week producing new code, and nearly 80% spend less than half of their time on it. On the other hand, 67% are proofreading more generated code than a year earlier and 52% are spending more time debugging problems introduced by AI. Learning time has doubled, to 9 hours per week compared to 4.

The shift can also be seen in compensation: mastery of AI tools tops the list of skills cited as warranting a raise (29%), ahead of system architecture (20%) and human skills — communication, mentoring, collaboration (15%). On the management side, 78% of CTOs have increased their spending on code review, quality assurance and validation, but only 25% are investing in human skills. The decision to ship to production is rarely delegated: only 7% of developers entrust it entirely to AI. Finally, 86% consider their job more fulfilling, compared to 76% a year earlier.