OpenAI DevDay 2026 - Connecting the Dots… Days Later

Reis Sirdas — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:49:57 +0000

OpenAI DevDay 2026 was quite the spectacle. Things kicked off with a protest outside the venue entrance, followed by food served under canopies that were dripping water onto our heads, multiple live demo fails, and a lot of showboating. My favorite was the French head of developer experience entering the keynote wearing the viral Macron-style aviator sunglasses.

An attendee told me last year's sessions were more technical. Another told me the food was much better in the past. Not having been to previous editions, I can't say for sure. But one thing that I can say for certain is that the OpenAI team rushed to pull everything together for this event. Do demos usually fail during OpenAI DevDay? I was too afraid to ask...

When AI is not doing what I want, I also write "go build it"

Throughout the day, I was trying to get my hands on the freshly announced features. I was at the game-making breakout session struggling to use the Cloud agent. At another point, I tried controlling the agent remotely from my phone, and it threw me into a never-ending loop of scanning a QR code on my laptop to no avail. Ironically, Dots were to be found everywhere (all over the walls, a giant clock, stickers, even Dippin' Dots ice cream), everywhere but my computer. In the end, I was able to get the Cloud agent to work somewhat. I had to sign up for the mobile beta to fix whatever was broken with Codex Remote. And I found Dots on my account days later...

Sol 6.1, which was another big DevDay announcement, reached my account after DevDay, and it has actually become my go-to coding model. In a recent TIME interview, Sam Altman conceded that they had faltered in the past year, and that they should've been focusing on the models more. I think we all agree with that sentiment.

Almost none of the things they announced were available on DevDay. Will they learn from this and not try to release everything everywhere all at once during the release announcement? Or at least pre-record their demos? Or could they just skip announcing features during DevDay and have engineer-focused workshops instead? It'll be interesting to see what they do next year...

Some funny moments:

The moderator of the Closing Q&A tried so hard to not let the audience ask questions live, only to be thwarted by Thibault Sottiaux running around with a mic
Apparently their internal Dot warned them that the demos would fail, which ironically would have been a cool demo to make
The bartenders were basically serving straight shots, not cocktails

Exploring the Stack Overflow 2025 Developer Survey

Reis Sirdas — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 13:15:00 +0000

Every year, Stack Overflow publishes its Developer Survey, which offers a useful snapshot of the software development industry.

While we wait for the 2026 results, I wanted to explore the most recent data from 2025 in a little more depth. Stack Overflow already publishes a great overview, but I wanted something more interactive: filters for compensation, employment status, experience, developer role, frameworks used, and more.

So I built a dashboard.

Open the interactive dashboard →

In this blog post, I’ll go over some of the AI-related findings I observed.

The dashboard uses the raw survey data and is filtered to U.S.-based respondents. By default, it shows employed respondents who identify as professional developers, but you can change that from the sidebar.

State of AI in 2025

2025 was a big year for AI in software development. Coding agents such as Claude Code and OpenAI Codex had only recently been introduced, and developers were still figuring out how, or whether, to use them. At the same time, the industry was changing quickly, with AI becoming increasingly difficult to separate from conversations about productivity, hiring, and layoffs.

Agentic coding was not very popular

We are entering the era of agentic coding, which means using AI agents to plan and complete coding tasks with minimal human intervention.

In 2025, 67% of respondents said they did not use AI agents, while only 11% said they used them daily.

Compare this with general AI tool usage, where 60% said they used AI tools at least weekly.

Given that Claude Code and Codex had only recently been released when the 2025 survey was conducted, I expect agent adoption to be much higher in the 2026 survey results.

Agentic coders reported higher pay

Daily users of AI agents reported earning $40,000 more on average ($200k) than those who did not plan to use AI agents ($160k). The difference also appears in a narrower group filtered by experience, developer role, education level, and age, which you can explore here.

I expect the gap to shrink as more companies adopt AI-forward policies, but it will be an interesting metric to track for the next few years.

Will devs get replaced by AI?

Ah, the age-old question. As a dev, it feels like writing code without AI was a lifetime ago.

15% of respondents said they saw AI as a threat to their jobs, while 65% said they did not.

Interestingly, that number rises to 20% among daily users of AI agents and falls to 12% among respondents who do not plan to use them.

There are a few possible explanations:

Daily users have seen what agents can do
- These respondents also gave more favorable answers to other AI-related questions. They may see AI as both useful and potentially threatening.
Company environment
- For example, a company aggressively pushing AI adoption might create more negative sentiment among developers.
Self-selection
- Developers who are already concerned about AI may use it more often to understand it and stay competitive.

Explore the dashboard

I have added several charts that update live as you change the filters. Hopefully, you can use them to explore the data and draw your own conclusions.

All filters are encoded in the URL, so you can share a specific slice of the data with a link.