Claude Code Passed Cursor in Job Posts. One in Four Hiring Companies Now Names an AI Coding Tool.

Say you use Claude Code or Cursor every day. Should it go on your CV? In July we counted which AI coding tools tech companies name in their own job posts, to get a feel for that. Cursor was first, Claude Code a close second, GitHub Copilot a distant third. About one hiring company in five named any of them.

Three months is a long time in this corner of the industry, so we counted again.

On October 6, 2026, 197 of the 762 tech companies we track with open roles name at least one AI coding tool in a job post. That is 25.9%, about one in four, up from 19.3% (167 of 866) in July. And the order at the top has flipped.

The new leaderboard

Companies naming each tool in at least one open job post:

Claude Code went from second to first, by two companies. It is now named in 261 open roles, Cursor in 260. That is about as close as a race gets, and we would not bet the house on the order holding until January.

The bigger mover is Codex: from 38 companies to 60, up more than half in three months. Copilot grew, but slowly, and Windsurf went backwards.

The two leaders also tend to show up together. 81 companies name both Cursor and Claude Code (67 in July). Companies are not picking one, they are listing the toolbox.

Who names them most

By number of roles that mention any of these tools:

The first two are each naming their own product, which is fair enough but tells you nothing about the market. From Toast down it gets more interesting: companies that list four or five tools in the same set of posts. That reads less like "we use X" and more like "use whatever you are fastest in, but use something".

Does it matter for your application?

Probably more than it did in July. A few things from the numbers:

It is not just a senior thing. 4.4% of senior roles name an AI coding tool, 3.5% of mid-level roles and 3.9% of junior roles. Juniors are not being shielded from it.

It is still a minority of roles. 472 of 11,704 open tech roles name one of these tools, 4%. The company count (one in four) is high because a company only needs one post to count. Most posts, even at those companies, do not mention it.

But when a post does mention one, it is a hint about how that team works. One of our recent spotlights, Prezly, put it plainly in a job post: they want to know if Claude Code or Cursor is "a part of your dev environment".

So if you use one of these tools seriously, say so, and be specific about how. If you do not, it is worth knowing that a quarter of the companies hiring now mention at least one of them somewhere in their posts.

What changed in how we count

The July post and this one are close, but not identical measurements, and we would rather tell you than have you find out:

• July counted 866 hiring companies. Today it is 762, because we now count only companies with open roles after merging duplicate postings, and because the set of companies we track has changed. The share is the fair comparison, not the raw count.

• We do not know the exact tag patterns the July count used, so a few companies could have moved between "Copilot" and "not Copilot" for that reason alone. Our Copilot number today counts any tag containing "copilot", which includes a handful of non-GitHub Copilots.

• The tool on each role is extracted from the post by a model, so it cannot tell "you will use Cursor" from "experience with tools like Cursor".

The original July post is here: The AI Coding Tool You Use Is Now a Hiring Signal. We will count again in January.

If your team lists one of these in its job posts, we are curious why, and what you actually look for when a candidate says they use it. Tell us in Discord.