Copilot vs. Cursor vs. Reality: Why 59% of Developers Use Both (And Then Some)

Here's the open secret on your engineering floor: your company pays for GitHub Copilot Enterprise, but you've been sneaking Cursor sessions since December. Your tech lead pretends not to notice because she's running Claude Code in her terminal for the gnarly refactors. The intern, bless him, still thinks we all follow the "approved tooling" memo. We don't. According to Microsoft's own research, 78% of AI users now bring their own tools to work , and a Gartner survey found 69% of organizations either know or suspect their developers are using prohibited AI tools. This isn't shadow IT in the malicious sense. It's an efficiency signal. Developers aren't sneaking tools to cause problems. They're sneaking tools because the sanctioned ones can't keep up. The "One Tool to Rule Them All" procurement strategy made sense in 2022. In 2026, it's actively killing velocity. We fragmented because one tool can't serve three cognitive modes The AI coding landscape splintered for a reason. The tools tha