AI Recommendation Standings / archive
AI coding assistants: September 2026
The final September 2026 standings for “What AI coding assistant should I use?”. These numbers are fixed and can be cited by permalink. See the current standings.
AI share of voice · September 2026
145 sampled answers · 5 models
- 1GitHub Copilot▼ 31.31%Kimi K2.6—
- 2Claude Code▼ 140%not named this month· quiet
- 3Cody▼ 80%not named this month—
- 4Cursor▼ 310%not named this month—
- 5Windsurf▼ 120%not named this month—
- 6Zed▼ 2.80%not named this month—
Biggest mover: GitHub Copilot ▼ 31.3 pts vs the previous month
Share of voice weights each compared model equally: it is the average, across the models, of how often each one named the tool in its own answers, so a model probed more than another can't skew it. Model chips list which AI models named it this month; the pulse is the sentiment of that month's developer mentions across Hacker News, Reddit, GitHub, Stack Overflow, Bluesky and more.
Quotable · copy freely
Averaged equally across 5 AI models, GitHub Copilot is named in 1% of answers about ai coding assistants (1 of 5 name it).
The 3 prompts behind these standings
- ›What AI coding assistant should I use? (recommendation)
- ›What are the best GitHub Copilot alternatives? (alternatives)
- ›Cursor vs GitHub Copilot, which is better? (comparison)
Each prompt is sampled several times per model per probe because answers vary run to run; 145 answers across 4 probe runs fed this month.