AI Recommendation Standings / archive
AI coding assistants: October 2026
The final October 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 · October 2026
333 sampled answers · 9 models
- 1Cursor▲ 0.40.4%Claude Sonnet 4.6—
- 2GitHub Copilot▼ 0.60.4%Claude Sonnet 4.6—
- 3Claude Code±00%not named this month· quiet
- 4Cody±00%not named this month—
- 5Windsurf±00%not named this month—
- 6Zed±00%not named this 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 9 AI models, Cursor is named in 0.4% of answers about ai coding assistants (1 of 9 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; 333 answers across 5 probe runs fed this month.