TL;DR: There have been a couple tweets and posts about the AI adoption curve that I found interesting:

• Addy Osmani’s Tweet: https://x.com/addyosmani/status/2086537405763551551
• The post Addy is Referencing: https://x.com/vasuman/article/2085806422072418632

I highly recommend reading the original posts but I will do my best to summarize them and add my own thoughts.

The Gist

If you look at the people posting to social media the most about AI, you’ll probably feel left behind. They’re running dozens or hundreds of agents and probably shipping more than you. But, they are not representative of the rest of the dev world. They are the 1% of the 1%. The thing that might be missed is that you reading their posts is probably separating you from a much larger cohort of devs that are still trying to figure out how to use AI effectively in their day to day work. They shouldn’t feel too left behind either. The world is changing too quickly to make trying to keep up worth it in some cases.

The Actual Gaps

There is a really good visualization I was shown recently at an AI Tinkerers event. It shows a grid of squares in which each square represents millions of people. I couldn’t find the exact image but I did find an app hosted on Netlify that is very close to what I was shown. Each dot in the grid is ~3.2 million people. It’s important to recognize that this represents the entire population of the world and not just software developers. However, I think it’s still worth considering in the greater picture of things. I encourage you to check it out for yourself. But, I will do my best to point out things that jump out to me from the visualization.

From the image above, I see several things:

• The largest section consists of people who haven’t used AI at all. This could be due to age reasons or socioeconomic reasons.
• Of people that use AI at all, the majority are just chatbot users and that seems to be the largest growing cohort over the past 2 years.
• The AI workforce, people that build AI tools, has increased pretty significantly.
• People paying for AI subscriptions but not necessarily software developers has almost tripled.
• Vibe coding has exploded in popularity.
• The red squares represent devs using tools like Codex, Cursor, Claude Code, etc. They have grown by about 60% from 16M to about 21M.

That 16M to 21M might seem like a lot but recent estimates put the global software developer number at somewhere around 48M. Over half the devs out there are not using dev tools at all. Many still just use chatbots and still more don’t use any at all.

Expertise Still Matters

Anyone who has spent considerable time using AI agents knows that they can go off the rails. One trip over to one of the many AI subreddits filled with vibe coders will be a fun excursion. AI might be pretty good at coding, but that is only after considerable coaxing and fine tuning. It can leave out things that you forgot to explicitly tell it to do but on the flip side, it can do things that you never asked for.

A recent post by Matt Biilmann from Netlify is a great example of this. They hosted an internal hackathon in which anyone from the company could join in. One engineer put in the effort to plan out the data flow and architect the workflow while a person from the sales team went straight to prompting and “eventually hit a wall”.