Two years ago, AI was supposed to wipe out software jobs. Instead, developer hiring has bounced back above trend and developers are now the fastest-growing job category in the latest data from The Economist.
By 2026, AI-related white-collar work is around 700,000 jobs above where normal hiring would have put it.
And the boom isn’t limited to software. AI data centers are also creating roughly 300,000 extra jobs for electricians, plumbers and construction workers.
AI didn’t just replace jobs. It changed which skills companies are willing to pay for. The developers getting hired today are increasingly the ones who know how to work with AI, direct AI and build with AI.
And this pattern could spread far beyond coding. AI may replace some tasks, but people who know how to use it could become even more valuable.
OPENAI 🔥: Astra scored 63% on ARC-AGI-3 with a standard harness.
> GPT-6 Astra surpasses the human baseline in action efficiency on ARC-AGI-3. It used fewer actions than the median tested human on 96% of levels.
> A key behavior observed in GPT-6 Astra was its ability to turn unfamiliar environments into compact symbolic world models. It represented game mechanics as logical rules and developed its own domain-specific language shorthand to track state and plan actions.
