The most reliable prediction in tech over the past two years has been that AI coding assistants would hollow out demand for software developers. The labor market has now pushed back. According to Indeed Hiring Lab data cited by CNBC, US software-development job postings have risen almost 15% since February 2025, the month Anthropic launched Claude Code, even as overall job postings across its index fell 7% over the same period.
The rebound is not a vote of no confidence in AI coding tools, which keep getting better. GitHub said back in 2023 that on projects where AI was available it was close to writing half of all code, and an unverified analysis circulated this fall claiming AI-written code across GitHub as a whole has passed the halfway mark. What GitHub has confirmed is directional: in October it reported that one in three pull requests now involve an AI agent, up from fewer than one in ten a year ago. "If that pace holds, within the next two years, most of the code pushed to GitHub could be written by an agent," the company wrote in a report on scaling secret protection. "Much of it may never be fully read by a human."
The recovery is real but sharply uneven. Indeed Hiring Lab found that senior roles accounted for 71% of the increase in software-development postings between May 2025 and May 2026, and job titles that mention AI made up 37% of the growth. Postings also remain about 27.5% below their pre-pandemic level, meaning the market has recovered from the post-2022 crash without returning to the zero-rate hiring peak. Economist Sneha Puri of Indeed Hiring Lab told CNBC that companies have realized they still need developers to oversee AI-generated work, refine products and integrate the tools into client operations, particularly the growing cohort of workers who help businesses apply AI rather than build it.
"It wasn't that long ago that we were reading the headline that there will be no more need for software developers," Eric Kutcher, North America chair at McKinsey, said in a recent CNBC interview. "We're seeing much more growth in the places we thought we were gonna see the biggest displacement." McKinsey Global Institute's research notes the earlier decline was not purely an AI story, since postings fell steeply from a 2022 peak as tech companies unwound pandemic-era over-hiring.
The winners-and-losers split runs by age more than by skill alone. Stanford's 2026 AI Index found employment in AI-exposed occupations for workers aged 22 to 25 has fallen 16% since generative AI took hold, with early-career software developers seeing a steeper decline of 20% even as senior developer roles expand. Puri's advice to students is to build fluency with AI tools without neglecting communication and leadership skills, and she argues employers bear responsibility too: "Today's entry-level talent becomes tomorrow's senior experts. If employers don't build those pipelines now, they're not going to have senior talent they need 10 years down the line."
The long-run projection from the Bureau of Labor Statistics remains positive, with developer employment expected to grow 10% from 2025 to 2035, from about 1.72 million to 1.89 million jobs. But GitHub's own report closes on a warning that cuts against the comfort of that number: as AI pushes more code into the world, the volume of vulnerabilities will become untenable unless the humans who remain can scale with the technology to police it. The profession is being reshaped around reviewing, securing and integrating machine-written code, and the job postings suggest the market is paying a premium for exactly that.
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