Who is running the loop, and what it costs them

Changelog

1. Edition 2 · 2026-10-16

   Four new series from a research sweep on adoption, all with dated primary sources where they exist. Surveys: across three JetBrains waves the share of professional developers using Claude Code at work went from 3% to 18% to 39% in fourteen months while GitHub Copilot fell from 29% to 21% and Cursor returned to 12%; Stack Overflow's 2026 survey has Claude Code used by 65.5% of respondents in the past year against Copilot's 58.7%. Routers: OpenRouter's trailing-30-day top apps are Hermes Agent, Claude Code, Kilo Code and Cline. Companies: Cursor's stated run rate went from $1B in November 2025 to about $4B by June 2026, Lovable's from $100M to $600M in fourteen months, and Copilot's user count from 15M to 50M in fifteen months. Ten markers added.

   • surveys.jetbrains: work adoption by tool across the 2025 State of Developer Ecosystem (Apr-Jun 2025), the January 2026 AI Pulse (10,000+ developers) and the 2026 State of Developer Ecosystem (May-Jul 2026, 15,000+): Claude Code 3 → 18 → 39%, Copilot 29 → 29 → 21%, Cursor 12 → 18 → 12%, Codex 0 → 3 → 16%, Antigravity 6 → 6%, OpenCode 7% (https://blog.jetbrains.com/research/2026/04/which-ai-coding-tools-do-developers-actually-use-at-work/; https://blog.jetbrains.com/research/2026/08/ai-coding-agent-adoption-2026/). surveys.stackOverflow2026: coding agents used in the past year, n = 12,255, eighteen tools from Claude Code 65.5% to Aider 2.1% (https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2026/ai/data).
   • topApps: OpenRouter's Top Apps by tokens, trailing 30 days through 15 Oct 2026: Hermes Agent 53.8T, Claude Code 34.3T, Kilo Code 24.3T, Cline 20.5T, pi 12.9T, Codex 11.7T, omp 10.6T, Freebuff 9.7T, OpenClaw 7.5T, DeepSeek Harness 6.1T, Command Code 4.2T, OpenHands 3.4T, with a 24 Aug 2026 snapshot alongside for comparison. Caveat: the coding apps roughly tripled and Codex and OpenClaw rose about a hundredfold between the two snapshots, which looks like an attribution or coverage change on OpenRouter's side rather than organic growth; treat the August column as a different measurement until OpenRouter explains (https://openrouter.ai/rankings; https://codesota.com/agentic/openrouter-apps).
   • runRates: Cursor $100M (Jan 2025) → $500M (Jun 2025) → $1B (Nov 2025, cursor.com) → $2B (Feb 2026) → $3B (Apr 2026) → about $4B (Jun 2026), the last three via Bloomberg and TechCrunch sources; Lovable $100M (Jul 2025) → $600M (Sep 2026, lovable.dev); Claude Code over $500M (Sep 2025, press) → over $2.5B (Feb 2026, anthropic.com); Cognition $492M (May 2026, press) → almost $900M (Sep 2026, cognition.com). Press-sourced points carry secondary = true and hollow dots on the chart (sources in runRates.sources).
   • users: GitHub Copilot 15M (Apr 2025) → 20M (Jul 2025) → 26M (Oct 2025) → 50M (Jul 2026) from Microsoft earnings calls; Antigravity weekly actives 1.5M (Feb 2026) → 2.4M (Jul 2026) from Alphabet calls; OpenAI Codex weekly users 2M (Mar 2026) → 4M (Apr) → 5M (Jun) → 7M (Jul), all via press because openai.com returned 403, and not extended past July because OpenAI then switched to a combined Codex plus ChatGPT Work count (15M in August, scope unstated) (sources in users.sources).
   • Markers added: Copilot paid subscribers 4.7M (Jan 2026); one in three GitHub pull requests involves an agent (Jul 2026); Claude Code 4% of public GitHub commits (Feb 2026); JetBrains 90% weekly and 68% daily agent use; Stack Overflow 26.2% using agents at work with 63.1% daily; Requesty cost per Claude Code user $8 → $78 per month; OpenRouter: 6 Feb 2026 was the last day humans used more tokens than agents; Terminal-Bench 4.0 has 5 distinct harnesses across 35 rows; VS Code Marketplace installs; Lovable 60M+ projects.
   • Not added, for lack of a primary or a definition: Codex counts after July 2026 (combined metric), Claude Code weekly-active counts (Anthropic says they doubled but gives no number), Kilo Code and OpenCode self-reported user totals (3M+ and 16M+ monthly, company claims with no basis stated), Devin user counts (aggregator only), and amplifying.ai agent-PR estimates (declared-metadata heuristics).

2. Edition 1 · 2026-10-16

   First edition. Weekly download series for nineteen harness and agent-framework packages from the npm and PyPI registries (a year of npm history, 26 weeks of PyPI), the HarnessTax cost-per-attempt table, the Portkey first-call context comparison, the Requesty cache-hit table by harness, and six dated adoption markers. Downloads are the only series here that updates itself; everything else moves when a study or a company publishes.

   • Downloads: Codex CLI 23.9M and Claude Code 12.5M weekly npm downloads in the week of 5 Oct 2026; Claude Agent SDK 12.1M on npm and 7.6M on PyPI; LangGraph 12.2M on PyPI; AWS Strands 8.8M; OpenCode 3.0M; Google ADK 2.2M; OpenHands 190K; Aider 58K; Gemini CLI 407K after its June retirement for individual tiers (https://api.npmjs.org/downloads/range/last-year/@openai/codex; https://pypistats.org/api/packages/langgraph/overall).
   • HarnessTax (Sep 2026): GPT-5.6 Luna $0.030 per attempt in Pi vs $0.152 in Claude Code on SWE-bench Lite at 53.3% vs 55.6% success; Fable 5 $0.666 (Pi) vs $0.890 (Codex) vs $1.329 (Claude Code) at 96.7% to 97.8%; GPT-5.6 Sol on Terminal-Bench 2.0 $0.421 in Pi at 83.3% vs $0.976 in Codex at 78.9%. The site renders only a loader; figures confirmed from the study's own write-up as reproduced by digitalapplied.com (https://arena.ai/blog/coding-agents-harness-tax/).
   • First-call context for the same two messages: Pi about 2,600 tokens, Codex CLI about 15,000, Claude Code about 27,000 (Portkey, 13 Apr 2026, https://portkey.ai/blog/the-agent-harness-tax). Cache-hit rate by harness on Requesty traffic, Apr 2026: Claude Code 91.9%, OpenCode 89.0%, Aider 84.0%, Zed 80.1%, Roo Code 73.6%, Forge 63.9%, Cline 61.4%, Kilo Code 45.5% (https://requesty.ai).

Method: download counts come from the public npm and PyPI download APIs, bucketed into Monday-keyed ISO weeks with partial weeks dropped; a download is an install or an update, not a user, and npm counts include CI traffic, so read the trend rather than the level. Cost and context figures are quoted from the studies named on each chart. Markers are dated statements from company posts or filings. Edited by hand; a changelog records every change.