RESEARCH
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No. 142
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What AI Actually Did to Software Jobs
Software development job postings bottomed in May 2025, then rebounded while overall U.S. postings continued to slide.
Jacob Radke
2 min read
Indeed job-posting indices for software development and the overall United States labor market from September 2023 through May 2026.
Source · Indeed Hiring Lab
Off the May 2025 low
+19%
Rebound in software development postings on Indeed.
Postings trough
61.1
Software development index reading in May 2025.
Current postings index
72.6
Latest software development postings reading.
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Software development postings on Indeed fell roughly 35% from their 2023 peak and bottomed in May 2025. Then they rebounded, while overall U.S. 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. The data right now points one direction.
Until next week,
Jacob
Sources & method
Data is pulled from the Indeed Hiring Lab GitHub repository under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. The overall-postings measure is a seasonally adjusted index with February 1, 2020 equal to 100.
Software development postings use the total-postings index on the same baseline. The nine annotated model releases span Claude 3 Opus in March 2024 through Claude Opus 4.8 in May 2026.
The May 2025 trough in software-development postings coincides with the peak AI model-release cadence, providing the visual contrast that anchors the analysis.
Written by
Jacob Radke
Partner, Wealth Advisor
Jacob writes the weekly charts. Jacob leads the firm’s platform, including trading, research, portfolio systems and technology. He also sits on the firm’s board and investment committee, and advises client families.
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