“Performance (42%), flexibility (41%), ease of use (40%), and integration (36%) are the four most essential qualities in enterprise AI development tools, according to those surveyed,” Gunnar noted. “Yet over a third of those surveyed also said those very same traits are the rarest.”
Around one third of respondents also bemoaned the state of four other essential traits: documentation quality, cost-effectiveness, community support and resources, and that the tools be open source.
Given the number of tools they need to do their job, it’s no surprise that developers are loath to spend a lot of time adding another to their arsenal. Two thirds of them are only willing to invest two hours or less in learning a new AI development tool, with a further 22% allocating three to five hours, and only 11% giving more than five hours to the task. And on the whole, they don’t tend to explore new tools very often — only 21% said they check out new tools monthly, while 78% do so once every one to six months, and the remaining 2% rarely or never. The survey found that they tend to look at around six new tools each time.