If you’re a software engineer, some new research from one hiring analytics firm suggests that AI Jobs Armageddon has not yet materialized. Data from TrueUp, reported by Business Insider on April 3 says the number of software engineers has climbed by 30% since the start of this year.
It’s an important complication to the idea that AI is replacing humans. But if you’re a coder and your professional life doesn’t feel as copacetic as this report suggests, there are probably good reasons for that.
Back in February, the stock market experienced a brief sell-off tied to something very rational and fact-based: a piece of speculative fiction about AI and job losses posted on Substack. “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis,” was the title, and it was from an analysis firm called Citrini Research. Imagine, it offered, if U.S. unemployment spiked to 10.2%, mostly from AI replacing white-collar jobs. Now imagine an orangutan that can drive a car. Isn’t imagination fun?
I don’t mean to be glib. I probably value wild speculation more than the average person, and Citrini Research’s story is worth thinking about. It’s just that if you believed Mark Cuban when he said in February, “Software is dead because everything’s going to be customized to your unique utilization,” and then you invested accordingly, you were at best premature.
Apparently as of the publication of the TrueUp report, there were 67,000 relevant job openings—a raw number higher than there’s been in over three years, and more than twice the number from when they were at a low ebb in 2023.
But now more than ever, a report like this should be taken as an interesting data point, rather than as a sign that everything is fine.
Even if, as TrueUp says, the number of job postings is way up, it’s important to keep in mind that in recent years, experiences reported by job seekers in all areas—not just software engineering—have gotten qualitatively bleaker due to ghost jobs and automated HR. As an article in the Atlantic by Annie Lowrey put it, “Young people are using ChatGPT to write their applications; HR is using AI to read them; no one is getting hired.”
And as the Guardian’s Eleanor Margolis wrote, “The hiring process has become so mechanised, both figuratively and literally, that it’s hard to believe that the people who end up being hired aren’t merely the best at gaming the system.”
And the jobs themselves, once obtained, might not be what coders once imagined they would do. Evidence is trickling in that AI tools may be increasing the sheer amount of software that’s being created. For instance, there’s been a 30% rise in the number of new apps in the Apple App Store from 2024 to 2025, which the Information tentatively attributes to ”the vibe coding effect.”
As an anonymous software engineer at Google told the Blood in the Machine newsletter last year:
“All of these will result in poorer software quality. ‘Anyone can write code’ sounds good on paper, but when bad code is massively produced, it hurts everyone including those who did not ask for it and have been trusting the software industry.”
So maybe the “vibe coding effect” really is already creating jobs. That doesn’t necessarily mean the world should celebrate.
