💼 The Economist: Why Programmers Are the Only Profession Using AI Every Day
The 30.08.2026 issue examines whether anyone will catch up to developers: according to the publication's calculations, for data center construction to be profitable, total annual revenue from AI use must grow from approximately $150 billion to $2.5 trillion by the end of the 2020s. According to Stack Overflow, 4 out of 5 developers use AI coding tools, and the combined ARR of four AI coding startups (Cognition, Cursor, Lovable, Replit) grew from ~$800 million in June 2025 to ~$6 billion.
🌍 This figure determines the sustainability of the data center investment cycle: according to SemiAnalysis data for Q2 2026, coding already accounts for more than half of the combined ARR of OpenAI and Anthropic, and growth to $2.5 trillion must come from other areas. The publication names the nearest candidates: law (Harvey, Clio, Legora doubled their combined ARR to ~$1 billion), finance (Rogo: +100 enterprise clients and +50% ARR in a quarter) and customer service (Sierra — $200 million ARR).
👤 Code became an outlier due to four factors: open-source code is almost 1/5 of training datasets, tests provide a cheap deterministic signal for verifying output, context (codebase and API) is available in digital form, and engineers are the first to try new tools. This is a simple checklist for evaluating any AI deployment niche. Signal for developers: their segment is the most mature, and the dominant position is gradually being taken over by the in-house tools of OpenAI and Anthropic labs.
Source 1: https://www.economist.com/business/2026/08/30/will-anybody-use-ai-as-much-as-coders-do Source 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49594082