Coding with Python: Over 80 percent use ChatGPT

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The results of the eighth "Python Developers Survey" have been published. The Python Software Foundation and the development team of the Python IDE JetBrains PyCharm are behind the annual survey. In this edition, they were able to collect responses from over 25,000 Python developers worldwide. There is a clear trend towards AI use in coding: over 80 percent use ChatGPT and around half as many use GitHub Copilot.

AI coding is in vogue

The study organizers asked about AI tools that the participants had used or tried out for coding or other development-related activities. The vast majority – 82 percent – have already used ChatGPT from OpenAI. This is followed by GitHub Copilot with 39 percent and Google Gemini with 23 percent. Among the less frequently mentioned answers are the JetBrains AI Assistant and user-defined, local AI tools.

The most popular editors and IDEs: VS Code and PyCharm

When it comes to the development environments and editors that respondents use as their main tool, Visual Studio Code is in first place, followed by the JetBrains PyCharm development environment, which won over a quarter of respondents. This is followed by a single-digit percentage, with only four percent using Neovim or Jupyter Notebook as their main editors and three percent using Vim.

Using language models in the company

The online conference LLMs in the enterprise on October 29 will show how to select the right model, set up the infrastructure and keep security under control. The iX and dpunkt.verlag theme day will also provide an outlook on Liquid Foundation Models as the next generation of LLMs.

Python is used for a variety of purposes: primarily for data analysis, but also frequently for web development, machine learning, data engineering and in academic research. Less common uses include network programming, game development and mobile development. Over time, it can be seen that use for machine learning has increased significantly since the last survey – from 34 to 41 percent (multiple answers possible). At the lower end of the scale, MLOps has seen a small increase from eight to ten percent.

Python at work and at home

As in the previous year, around 50 percent of participants use Python both professionally and privately. 28 percent use Python exclusively for personal, educational or side projects, and only 20 percent use Python exclusively at work.

Most of the respondents (66%) work professionally as developers, and the majority (59%) are employed full-time by a company.

Methodology and data

The "Python Developers Survey 2024" is based on responses received between October and November 2024 via the official channels of the Python Software Foundation. After filtering out inappropriate and duplicate responses, 25,000 valid responses remained. People from numerous countries took part, primarily from the USA (14%), India (11%) and Germany (6%).

The results can be found in graphic form on the JetBrains website. The anonymized raw data is available online, as is that of previous surveys.

(mai)