Claude Code, a necessity for your developers: the gap is widening

Claude Code, a necessity for your developers: the gap is widening

Until a year ago, using AI to code was a matter of curiosity. A gadget, a slightly doped autocomplete, something we tested on Friday afternoon between two deployments. Today, in February 2026, Claude Code is in the process of fundamentally redesigning the way developers work. And while some teams are increasing their delivery capacity by two or three, others continue to code exactly as in 2023.

What is at stake right now is not a simple tool evolution. It is the emergence of a two-speed development market, where the productivity gap between those who use Claude Code and those who do not use it is widening every month. This article explains why, supported by data, and especially what changes in concrete terms on a daily basis in a development team.

Claude Code is not “just another Copilot”

Before going any further, you need to understand what makes Claude Code fundamentally different from first-generation AI assistants like GitHub Copilot or Tabnine. These tools are autocompleters: they live in your IDE, predict what you're going to type, and offer suggestions line by line. They make you type faster. Claude Code is doing something radically different.

Claude Code is an agent that runs directly in your terminal, with full access to your Unix file system and commands. Concretely, it reads your entire repository, understands the architecture of your project, plans changes on several files, executes them with checkpoints, and lets you review the diffs before accepting. The difference is between an intern who finishes your sentences and a senior developer who reads the entire codebase, writes an action plan, and delivers changes that are ready to merge.

It is this architecture that explains why Microsoft, the company that owns GitHub and sells Copilot, has itself widely adopted Claude Code internally for its engineering teams. When the company selling the competing product chooses your tool for their own critical work, the signal is hard to ignore.

The numbers that should keep you up at night

The adoption of Claude Code is no longer a niche phenomenon. In February 2026, the daily installations of the VS Code extension grew from 17.7 million to 29 million in just a few weeks, an exponential growth that recalls the ChatGPT moment at the end of 2022. According to a survey conducted by UC San Diego and Cornell University among 99 professional developers, Claude Code is at the top of the most used tools with 58 respondents, ahead of GitHub Copilot at 53 and Cursor at 51.

But the most striking figure is probably this: 4% of all public commits on GitHub are now generated by Claude Code, with projections that expect more than 20% by the end of 2026. We are no longer talking about a marginal tool, we are talking about a force that is restructuring the way source code is produced globally.

In terms of productivity, Anthropic's internal studies reveal that engineers who use Claude Code report a productivity gain of around 50%, compared to only 20% a year ago. The proportion of their daily work done with Claude increased from 28% to 59% in twelve months. And these are not just subjective impressions: there has been a 67% increase in pull requests generated per engineer per day since the adoption of Claude Code on a large scale.

What Claude Code changes concretely in a developer day

The statistics are good. But to understand why Claude Code has become indispensable, you have to look at what happens in the daily life of a team.

Debugging goes from hour to minute

55% of engineers at Anthropic use Claude Code daily for debugging, making it the number one use. Before Claude Code, a developer who encounters an obscure bug in a code base that he is not familiar with easily spends 30 to 60 minutes tracking the execution, reading the documentation, digging through Stack Overflow. With Claude Code, he describes the problem in natural language, and the agent analyzes the code, identifies the probable cause and proposes a fix. The resolution time changes from the order of an hour to that of the minute.

Understanding existing code is no longer a bottleneck

42% of developers use Claude Code every day to understand code they didn't write. This is a major change in the speed of a team, because one of the most time-consuming tasks in development is precisely to understand what was done before you. The onboarding of a new developer on a project, which typically took one to two weeks of skill development, accelerates drastically when Claude Code can serve as an interactive codebase guide from day one.

The tasks we never did are finally being done

This is perhaps the most counterintuitive point, and yet the most transformative. 27% of the work assisted by Claude Code concerns tasks that would never have been done without AI. The refactoring of this legacy module that everyone has been avoiding for two years, the technical documentation that no one has time to write, the internal dashboard tool that the product team has been asking for for six months. All these “papercuts”, these small improvements that accumulate in the backlog without ever being prioritized, alone represent 8.6% of the use of Claude Code at Anthropic. At the level of a team, these small compounded gains end up transforming the overall quality of the product.

Every developer goes full-stack

Claude Code allows developers to leave their technical comfort zone without risk. A back-end developer can work on the front-end, a security engineer can analyze application code that he has never touched, a data team can build visualization dashboards. This phenomenon of “full-stackization” is documented: the various teams at Anthropic use Claude Code in very different ways, but always to extend their scope of expertise beyond their initial specialty.

Why teams that don't use Claude Code today are taking a real risk

You could say that all this is impressive but not urgent. That Claude Code is a “nice to have”, a tool that we will adopt when we have time. It is exactly this line of reasoning that is creating the divide.

The development market in 2026 is being structured around two classes of teams. On the one hand, those who have integrated Claude Code into their workflows and whose delivery capacity is increasing quarter after quarter. On the other hand, those that still code as before, with the same speed and the same development cycles, while their competitors deliver two to three times faster.

The average complexity of tasks delegated to Claude Code increased from 3.2 to 3.8 on a scale of 5, where 5 represents expert-level tasks requiring weeks of human work. The tool is no longer content with doing the simple job: it is upgrading, and developers who use it daily are developing what Anthropic calls “strategic delegation skills,” the ability to know what to entrust to AI and how to verify the result. This skill, like any other technical skill, is refined with practice. The longer you wait, the bigger the gap with those who already have it.

There is another effect, which is more subtle but just as important. 67% of developers now use AI tools in their daily work, up from only 30% two years ago. Recruiting is changing. The best developers expect to work with Claude Code or equivalent tools. A team that does not offer these tools loses attractiveness in an already tense tech recruitment market.

The paradox that no one is telling you (and why the tool alone is not enough)

Here's the nuance that most articles on Claude Code forget to mention, and that's perhaps the most valuable piece of information in this article.

Recent research by Faros AI shows a troubling paradox: despite spectacular individual gains (21% more tasks, 98% more pull requests per developer), DORA-type organizational metrics, i.e. deployment frequency, delivery time, and change failure rate, remain largely unchanged in many organizations. This is called the “AI productivity paradox.”

The reason is simple: when developers code two to three times faster, the bottleneck moves. It goes from development to code review, to validation, to integration. If the organization does not restructure its workflows around this new reality, individual gains do not translate into collective gains. Code is piling up in pull requests waiting to be reviewed, CI/CD pipelines are becoming the new bottleneck, and the team feels like they're going in circles despite increased individual productivity.

This is exactly why licensing Claude Code to your developers without rethinking your processes is like buying Ferraris from your delivery people without widening the roads. The successful adoption of Claude Code is not a tool problem, it is an organizational problem.

The challenge is not to adopt Claude Code. The challenge is to transform the way you work so that individual gains become team gains.

Take action now

If you lead a technical team and Claude Code is not yet integrated into your workflows, each passing week widens the gap with the teams that did. And if you've adopted it without structured support, chances are you're only capturing a fraction of the potential.

Capsens offers dedicated support, Big Gap IA, designed to help development teams adopt Claude Code in a structured manner in 5 weeks, from auditing current practices to deploying at scale, including field training and the provision of internal tools that accelerate adoption.

Capsens is a Parisian tech agency founded in 2014 that has supported more than 150 clients in the development of their web and mobile platforms. When we spend our days building software with teams of developers, the question of how AI is transforming the business is not theoretical, it is our daily life. Learn more on capsens.eu

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