The dirty secret about AI coding tools in 2026:
Everyone's arguing about which tool is best — Cursor vs Claude Code vs Copilot...
Meanwhile, the people actually shipping are using all three. Different tools for different jobs.
Your IDE is a workshop, not a religion. Pick the right tool for the task, move on, ship the thing.
Nearly half of AI agent usage today is in software engineering.
Everything else is single digits.
Back office automation sits at 9.1%.
Marketing 4.4%.
Sales 4.3%.
Finance 4.0%.
Healthcare 1.0%.
Legal 0.9%.
Travel and logistics 0.8%.
Most people look at this and think, “AI is for coding.”
They're missing the big picture.
Agents are concentrated where tools, workflows, and feedback loops are already mature.
Software is just the easiest place to start. Clear tasks. Clean feedback. Low real-world risk.
But the real opportunity is outside of it...
Healthcare ops is still in the early innings.
Logistics coordination hasn’t embraced agents at all.
Legal workflows are wide open.
Finance back offices are still mostly manual.
If you’re building agents and competing in dev tools, you’re fighting in the most crowded room.
The bigger opportunity is in industries where autonomy hasn’t really shown up yet.
That’s where the next wave gets built.
New Anthropic research: Measuring AI agent autonomy in practice.
We analyzed millions of interactions across Claude Code and our API to understand how much autonomy people grant to agents, where they’re deployed, and what risks they may pose.
Read more: https://t.co/CllNkMF4ZZ
@admcollingwood@philippilk I think those concerns are minimal for this winter season at this point. For next year it's still open case, but have over year to prepare
@admcollingwood@philippilk oh ok I see you referred to Europe as a whole. Yes, some countries in Europe and especially Germany are in much tougher position