What AI Actually Did to Software Jobs

What AI Actually Did to Software Jobs

Software development postings on Indeed fell roughly 35% from their 2023 peak and bottomed in May 2025. Then they rebounded, while overall US job postings kept sliding and software developer postings climbed nearly 20% off the bottom. The two lines now run in opposite directions.

The reason is simple. AI lowered the cost of writing code, so there's more code being written across more businesses and use cases than ever before. GitHub processed 1 billion commits in all of 2025. By mid-2026 it's logging 275 million code commits per week. That's a 14x increase year over year. More code means more systems to build, integrate, and maintain. Demand for engineers rose because there's simply more software to manage.

Most people assumed AI's first casualty would be the people closest to it. So far, the opposite is true. Coding has been AI's breakout use case, and it's pulled engineers further into the economy, not out of it.

Whether that holds as the models keep improving is the open question.

Until next week,
Jacob

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