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U.S. software development job postings have risen since February 2025, the launch date for Anthropic's Claude Code, even as overall job postings fell, complicating predictions that AI would rapidly erase demand for developers.
Concerns about the future of the software development career are well-founded, and intensified as companies adopted AI-powered coding tools, especially as those tools keep getting better. As far back as 2023, Microsoft's software development platform GitHub said that on projects where AI was available, it was close to writing half of all code.
Some AI experts claim AI-written code across the entire GitHub platform has now passed the halfway mark . GitHub has not confirmed that, but in October it did report that one in three "pull requests" — the process in which coders that collaborate on development propose code changes for projects — now involve an AI agent. A year ago, GitHub said that number was fewer than one in 10. "If that pace holds, within the next two years, most of the code pushed to GitHub could be written by an agent. Much of it may never be fully read by a human," it stated .
Labor market researchers say that against this backdrop, the profession is evolving rather than disappearing. Data from Indeed Hiring Lab shows that U.S. software-development job postings have risen nearly 15% since February 2025, bucking both the overall job market and the coding data.
Some economic experts are pointing to the rebound in software job postings as confirmation for a glass half-full view of AI and the job market. "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 during a recent interview on CNBC's "Squawk on the Street." Instead, he said, as companies are producing more code than ever before, software developers who work with AI remain in high demand. "We're seeing much more growth in the places we thought we were gonna see the biggest displacement," Kutcher said.
Recent research on AI and the future of jobs from McKinsey Global Institute notes that the earlier decline in the software developer field was not solely an AI story. While in recent years AI has been automating software-development tasks, the rebound comes after a steep drop from a 2022 hiring peak, when technology companies pulled back after a pandemic-era surge in hiring.
But even after the recovery, software-development job postings remain about 27.5% below their pre-pandemic level, according to Indeed Hiring Lab data . Importantly, the increase is concentrated in senior-level roles and more experienced AI-oriented positions. Indeed Hiring Lab found that senior roles accounted for 71% of the increase in software-development postings between May 2025 and May 2026. Job titles that mention AI accounted for 37% of the increase.
AI tools may be allowing companies to produce code more quickly than developers could on their own. GitHub leaders have said in the past that as much if not more than 80% of code could eventually be written by AI, especially as developers become more comfortable working with AI tools. But that also could mean the demand for workers is concentrated on those…