(Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Marcello Calbuccia longtime Seattle tech and startup community leader.)
This month I surveyed early-stage founders in Seattle Founded About their use of AI tools and agents. There were some surprises in the data — not in the direction you’d expect — and trends worth talking about.
The sample size represents 22 startups each with between one and five software engineers, for a total of 42 people. What makes understanding this group valuable is that they are AI startups that started during a period when AI was able to program. This gives us a glimpse into the future of technology companies.
The first question I asked in the survey was about what percentage of production code is written by AI. I wrote this question explicitly to exclude unit tests, scripts, documentation, and other items that are not related to the company’s core value proposition. If you know one thing about AI coding, it’s that it generates large amounts of unit tests, readme files, and scripts. None of this is about the code providing value to the customer.
Here’s the surprising fact: Of the 22 startups, four startups (18%) said AI writes 100% of their code. This is amazing! This does not mean that these people do not review and re-ask the AI to improve the code. However, this means that they do not write code in the IDE. There are 11 startups (50%) where AI writes 80-99% of the code. Adding in the four areas where AI writes everything, we find that 68% of startups have AI writing more than 80% of their production code. On the other end of the spectrum, three startups (13.6%) said AI writes less than 50% of their code.
Choose your weapons
From the news Cursor is getting in the press, you might think that the usage rate for this suite is close to 100%. In our sample, of 42 programmers from 22 unique startups, only 23 (54.7%) used the cursor. On average, Cursor programmers spent $113.63 per person in September. However, the most popular tool is Claude Code, with 64.3% of programmers using it and spending $167.41 per person in September. Cloud is the preferred tool for startups, used by 16 out of 22 (72.7%).
After Cloud and Corsor, there is a significant incline, with OpenAI Codex coming in a distant third as it is used by seven startups, representing 12 out of 42 programmers. On average, expenses with OpenAI Codex were $48.49 per person in September. The fourth and fifth places were GitHub Copilot and Google’s Gemini CLI. They had 9.52% and 4.76% of programmers using it respectively.
On average, each software engineer spent $182.55 on the top five AI tools mentioned above, with some startups spending more than $400 per person.
The founders also mentioned that they use a variety of tools to create production code, including Lovable, Devplan, Mentat, Factory.ai, Jetbrains Junie, Warp, and Figma.
Roadblocks
When we were asked what prevents more use of AI in programming, the number one complaint was code quality. Another barrier to faster adoption is the learning curve to get the agent to do what you want.
In terms of frustration, this group raises three main issues. First, the quality of the output requires significant reworking. Second, there is a mismatch between expectations and reality based on what everyone hears. Finally, the most common frustration – and I certainly sympathize with it – is context management and dealing with large code bases.
What’s next?
In the survey, I asked them about their intention to continue using AI tools and agents to help with product development. The survey asked founders whether they intended to add, remove, increase or decrease the use of each tool. The biggest winner, so far, has been Codex, with nine startups (40.9%) saying they are not using it yet, but plan to use it in the fourth quarter. Once I normalize the data to account for expectations for Q4, Claude will maintain his leadership, but Codex will match in number of startups. Both Cursor and GitHub Copilot will trend down a bit, with each startup saying they will stop using it. Finally, Gemini CLI may see an uptick in adoption, as three startups claim to be trying it out in Q4.
Unlike many other aspects of software engineering such as choosing a cloud provider, language, or database, AI tools and agents do not represent a zero-sum market. In this survey, 68.2% of startups used more than one AI tool to help develop production code. Based on their stated intent, this number will grow to 86.4% in the fourth quarter.
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