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AI Coding Tools Glossary

Acceptance rate

The share of AI code suggestions a developer accepts; the most common but weakest measure of assistant value.

Acceptance rate = accepted suggestions ÷ shown suggestions. Google reports 37% for internal code completion. It is easy to log and easy to game (shorter suggestions get accepted more), and accepting is not the same as keeping: code can be accepted and then rewritten. Better downstream measures are retained-character rate, task completion time and defect rate, which is why controlled studies such as METR's use task time rather than acceptance.

Source: AI in software engineering at Google — Google Research

See the numbers behind this term: AI Coding Tools Statistics 2026.