Software engineer job postings are up 11% YoY

May 2, 2026

Dario Amodei said in January that AI would do most or all of what software engineers do within 6 to 12 months. The hiring data so far says the opposite.

We might be 6-12 months away from models doing all of what software engineers do end-to-end.

Dario Amodei said this at Davos in January. Roughly a year on, the data points the other way. Indeed job postings for software engineers are up about 11% year over year in early 2026. That is not a flat line. That is not a slow bleed. That is acceleration in the exact category that was supposed to be evaporating first.

The forecast

The claim was specific and time-boxed: within 6 to 12 months, models would do most or all of what software engineers do end-to-end. Engineers inside Anthropic, he said, were already not writing code by hand. The framing was not about productivity gains or augmentation. It was about replacement.

A forecast with a clock on it is a useful thing. It can be checked.

The data

The cleanest signal of demand for a profession is whether employers are paying to hire more of them. They are. Indeed postings for software engineers are up roughly 11% year over year in early 2026, and that is the same window in which the forecast was supposed to be visibly playing out. Citadel Securities used the same data point to push back on the broader doomsday narrative, and the point holds here too.

The simpler explanation

If engineers were really being replaced end-to-end, employers would not be posting more roles for them. The simpler story is the boring one: AI is changing how engineers work, not whether they exist. Tasks are being absorbed. Jobs are not.

It is fine for a CEO to be bullish on his own product. Dressing that bullishness as a labor market forecast is a different move, and this one is aging poorly.