Daily install trends of AI coding extensions in VS Code
For the past 4 years, I've been tracking the install counts of AI coding extensions in the Visual Studio Code marketplace (GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, etc.) Today, I built an interactive dashboard that lets you see daily install counts for any of them over time. The chart shows GitHub Copilot by default, and you can overlay or swap in any of the other 20+ tools to compare. You can also see important dates in each tool's history (pricing changes, major releases, etc.) and how daily installs changed around those dates. Important caveats: 1) This only tracks VS Code extension…
In plain words
This interactive dashboard displays four years of daily install data for over 20 AI coding extensions in Visual Studio Code, including GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, and OpenAI Codex. Users can view individual tools or overlay multiple extensions to compare trends, and see how major events like pricing changes and releases affected installation rates. The dashboard tracks VS Code marketplace extensions only, not CLI usage or other IDEs, and includes a separate chart tracking Cursor's forum activity as a growth indicator since Cursor operates as a standalone editor rather than a marketplace extension.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
For the past 4 years, I've been tracking the install counts of AI coding extensions in the Visual Studio Code marketplace (GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, etc.) Today, I built an interactive dashboard that lets you see daily install counts for any of them over time. The chart shows GitHub Copilot by default, and you can overlay or swap in any of the other 20+ tools to compare. You can also see important dates in each tool's history (pricing changes, major releases, etc.) and how daily installs changed around those dates. Important caveats: 1) This only tracks VS Code extension installs, not CLI usage or other IDEs like JetBrains. 2) Cursor isn't included since it's a standalone editor (VS Code fork), not a marketplace extension. I added a second chart showing Cursor discussion forum activity as a proxy for its growth. Obviously not apples to apples, but felt I needed to measure Cursor's growth somehow. 3) This tracks daily installs per day, NOT total installs. Otherwise the charts would be boring and always go to the top and right. 4) The dashboard was coded using an AI coding assistant too. I used regular Claude :)
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