Developers Still Hand Write Most of Their CSS, and the Survey Proves It

The 2026 State of CSS survey results are in, and the headline everyone expected, anchor positioning as the most wanted feature, again, is the least interesting part of it. The more useful number is buried further down: most respondents said they use AI generated code for less than half of their CSS, with only a small minority relying on it for the majority.

That is worth sitting with for a moment, given how much of the last two years has been spent talking about AI writing the front end for us. CSS is exactly the kind of code AI tools are supposed to be good at, verbose, pattern heavy, full of prior art to draw on. And developers are still doing most of it by hand.

The likely reason is not resistance to the tools. It is that CSS bugs are visual, contextual and often invisible until a specific viewport or browser exposes them, which makes AI generated CSS something you still have to review pixel by pixel rather than trust outright. Until that review step gets cheaper, expect the survey to say the same thing again next year.