The AI Copilot Effect: How AI Assistants Changed Coding Time in 2026

AI coding assistants went from novelty to necessity in under three years. GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Cody, and dozens of alternatives now sit inside developers' editors, suggesting code, answering questions, and writing boilerplate. A Deloitte report on AI adoption in software development estimates that ~70% of enterprise development teams now use some form of AI coding assistance. But are they actually making developers more productive? Or just more reliant on autocomplete? We looked at real IDE u