The myth of the AI coding bubble
Hundreds of millions of dollars.
Every single month.
And not from desperate investors or idle hobbyists — from real developers.
From serious companies that mean business.
AI coding, an industry inching closer to the $10 billion figure, by each passing year.
There are still devs on Reddit who think they are too good for AI — but the biggest tech giants now have AI writing major portions of their codebase — and they are not going back.
Google now has AI writing as much as 50% of their codebase.

We have 20 million GitHub Copilot users.
GitHub Copilot Enterprise customers increased 75% quarter over quarter as companies tailor Copilot to their own codebases.
And 90% of the Fortune 100 now use GitHub Copilot.
— Microsoft Fiscal Year 2025 Fourth Quarter Earnings Conference Call

In this article, we’re going to go through why this wave of AI tooling is fundamentally different—starting with the one thing bubbles never have: real money.
The money is real (and it’s massive)

In a real bubble, companies burn billions with no path to profit. Yet AI coding tools are already printing money. Microsoft’s latest reports show that GitHub’s Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) has crossed the $2 billion mark. GitHub Copilot alone accounts for over 40% of GitHub’s total revenue growth.
This isn’t a “pilot program” or a free beta; this is a product that millions of developers and thousands of companies are paying for because it delivers immediate, measurable value.
In fact, Satya Nadella recently noted that Copilot is already a larger business than the entirety of GitHub was when Microsoft acquired it in 2018.
“Just a toy”
The “it’s just a toy” argument dies when you look at who is actually using these tools. This isn’t just for hobbyists or “vibe coders” building weekend projects. According to Microsoft’s 2025 earnings data, over 90% of the Fortune 100 are now using GitHub Copilot.
When companies like Goldman Sachs, Ford, and P&G integrate a tool into their core engineering workflow, they aren’t chasing a trend—they’re chasing efficiency. They’ve done the math. If an engineer costing $200k a year becomes even 20% more productive, the $20-per-month subscription isn’t an expense; it’s the highest ROI investment the company has ever made.
StackOverflow

If you want to see the “bubble” argument fall apart, look at the casualties of this revolution. We are witnessing the Stack Overflow collapse. For a decade, the standard workflow was: Encounter bug → Google error → Find Stack Overflow thread → Copy/Paste.
That era is over. Recent data shows that Stack Overflow traffic has plummeted, with the rate of new questions dropping by a factor of 10. Why? Because developers no longer need to wait for a human to answer their question in three hours when an AI can solve it in three seconds. This shift in developer behavior is permanent. You don’t “un-learn” that level of speed.
The speed of human thought
The most profound reason this isn’t a bubble is philosophical but practical: AI increases the speed of human thought actualizing itself in software. Historically, the bottleneck of software was the “syntax tax.” You had a great idea, but you had to spend hours wrestling with boilerplate, configuration, and documentation. AI removes that friction. It allows a developer to stay in “the flow,” moving from concept to execution at the speed of thought.
We aren’t just writing code faster; we are thinking bigger. When the “cost” of trying a new feature or refactoring a messy codebase drops to near zero, innovation explodes.
The dot-com bubble burst because the internet wasn’t ready for the promises being made. In 2026, the AI coding revolution is different: the infrastructure is here, the revenue is proven, and the productivity gains are undeniable.
This isn’t a bubble. It’s the end of the “typing” era of software engineering and the beginning of the “architecting” era. If you’re waiting for the pop, you’re just going to get left behind.








































































