Welcome back to The AI Shift, our weekly newsletter on AI and the labour market. This week, we’re doing a deep-dive on software jobs. We know the profession is being transformed by AI coding agents, with many developers saying they no longer need to write code at all any more. So does that mean they’re no longer in demand? We have crunched through millions of job adverts and found some pretty interesting answers.

John writes

The overall impact of AI on employment remains hotly contested and there has been much debate about which jobs are even vulnerable to automation, but one occupation whose days have been consistently touted as numbered is that of the software engineer. The job is heavy on well-specified tasks (where AI performs best), the tasks involve writing code (something LLMs are very good at), the code is deterministic (especially ripe for automation), and on top of all that the tech sector is famously trigger-happy when it comes to hiring and firing. Web developers, then, must be going extinct.