It’s been a bit too long of a gap, anyway some updates.

AI


  • On more serious notes, we have seen a number of big waves through the AI Coding Assistants part of the industry, the biggest of these being the aquisition of Windsurf by Cognition after talks with OpenAI failed. Windsurf’s founding team and several key researchers joined Google Deepmind in an acquihire and licensing deal, which includes non-exclusive access to Windsurf’s IP for a reported $2.4Bn. Some of the very earliest employees have been very public about their dissatisfaction with the deal for non founders. TBH a lot of this deal stinks to me, but the Cognition team did the right thing by the remaining Windsurf team, and having been in a startup that went boom over a weekend thats a nice thing to see. That said I don’t have all the info, so I am drawing conclusions. Ben Thompson has a good take.

Datapoints

  • GitHub (my employer), has passed 20M GitHub Copilot Users.

  • RedMonk (a former employer) published their December 2024 programming language rankings, showing no change with the leading languages remaining JavaScript, Python, Java, PHP and C#. The RedMonk ranking methodology has historically depended on Stack Overflow data as one source. Stack Overflow usage continues to decline rapidly.

  • Stack Overflow released their annual survey. My concerns about the demographics of this survey are well documented, but that aside there are some interesting nuggets, not least that the number of respondents has dropped by 45% - reflected in the RedMonk and Pragmatic Engineer observations above. Away from that uv, a new package manager for python, has (understandably) emerged as an admired technology. Python continues to grow in in popularity. An interesting little caveat is that Cloudflare is now more popular than AWS amoung people learning to code. I will be following this particular trend closely over the coming year.

  • The Pragmatic Engineer released an annual survey, TypeScript, Python and JavaScript were the most popular languages.

  • Docker released the 2025 State of Application Development survey. Lots of people use containers (unsurprisingly), although Docker do acknowledge that not everyone actually uses containers. I would argue its a defacto base choice for many new apps, and we are, thankfully, past the point where people thought they could stick an old app in a container and it was magically cloud native. Python was the most popular language among survey participants.

  • Atlassian released their 2025 Developer Experience Report ,which, somewhat unsurprisingly given Atlassian sells an an Internal Developer Portal (IDP), found 98% of those surveyed planned to use an IDP. There are some non marketing facts in there as well. There is a question of scale around developer portals, and just like you should not base your plans about microservices on Netflix, you shouldn’t base your IDP needs on Spotify.

  • Jellyfish, a software engineering intelligence (SEI) vendor, published survey results from analysing their user base showing AI use has increased 260% YoY with no noticeable decrease in quality. This may come as a shock to all the vendors selling tools to address all the supposed quality issues that are being introduced. Because, as we all know, all code written before AI was of the highest quality and security standards.