C++ Developers Use AI More Often, But Remain Skeptical
A Current survey by the Standard C++ Foundation shows that AI tools are becoming increasingly popular. However, many developers distrust quality of the results.
The letters AI fly around hooks and warning triangles.
(Image: tadamichi/Shutterstock.com)
- Manuel Masiero
C++ programmers are increasingly using AI assistants for their projects. This was found by the Standard C++ Foundation in their latest survey. However, it also became clear: distrust of artificial intelligence is still high.
The reason given by 77.5 percent of respondents is that AI delivers faulty output, while almost 70 percent generally do not trust the answers generated by artificial intelligence. For around 51 percent of participants, AI does too little in terms of contextual understanding. 49.5 percent report concerns regarding data security, and for 37.4 percent, the use of AI is primarily a cost issue.
More AI, especially with Copilot and ChatGPT
Nevertheless, AI assistants are used more frequently in the C++ environment than last year, even though “no” voters still dominate in all programming task areas considered by the survey.
Most survey participants are against the use of AI in the C++ environment.
(Image:Â Standard C++ Foundation)
When writing code, however, 39.1 percent of respondents now reach for an AI tool once to several times a week, compared to 30.9 percent in 2025. When writing tests, it's 32.2 percent instead of the previous 20 percent; for debugging, the share increases to 23.2 percent (2025: 11.5Â %), and for identifying performance problems, the share has more than doubled to about 14 percent (2025: 6.0Â %).
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With 53.4 percent of mentions, GitHub Copilot ranks first among the most frequently used code-specific AI assistants. It is followed by Claude Code with 44.2 percent and OpenAI Codex with 14.3 percent. Among non-code-specific AI tools, ChatGPT leads with 53.4 percent and Google Gemini with 39 percent. Grok (6.3Â %) and Perplexity (4.2Â %) are hardly used there.
Most Popular C++ Tools: VS Code and GCC
According to the survey, most C++ projects fall into the categories of development tools (26.1Â %), hardware/IoT (24.7Â %), gaming (23.5Â %), and utility apps (21.6Â %). They are predominantly implemented with CMake, which 81.9 percent of respondents name as their preferred build tool. Also popular are Ninja with 46.2 percent, MSBuild with 33.5 percent, and Make/nmake with 30.7 percent.
For IDEs, around 40 percent of respondents opt for Visual Studio Code, which received new features for AI agent configuration with the February update. GCC is predominantly used as a compiler (53.1Â %).
When asked what they would change about C++, many participants mention, among other things, standardized package and dependency management, shorter build times, support for ABI and compatibility breaks, and more security through stricter defaults.
The survey by the Standard C++ Foundation started on April 21st this year. It ran for a week and collected feedback from 1434 participants, an increase of 38 percent compared to 2025 (1036 people). Of these, 80.6 percent attest to having at least six years of C++ programming experience. More than ten years of experience are stated by 60.5 percent, and for almost 33 percent of participants, it's more than 20 years. The complete survey with many more details is available for download on the non-profit foundation's website here.
(mro)
