JetBrains' 2024 Developer Ecosystem survey found that 35% of developers use 6-10 development tools daily. Stack Overflow's 2025 survey puts the average at 7.3 distinct tools per developer per day. That is before counting the AI tools layered on top: Copilot for code generation, ChatGPT for research, Cursor for editing, Claude for code review, plus the AI features embedded in existing tools (VS Code's IntelliSense, GitHub's PR summaries, Jira's AI-generated stories).
Each tool has its own context, its own interface, its own authentication, its own notification stream, and its own cognitive load. The debugging tax is the cumulative cost of context-switching between these tools when something goes wrong.
I manage 35-50 engineers. We have opinions about tool selection. The short version: fewer tools, better integrated, is always cheaper than more tools, loosely connected.
The Numbers
JetBrains (2024, n=26,000):
