On 11 October, Linus Torvalds published an experimental branch for the Linux kernel. In his message, he explains how he worked. The code, the tests and the first draft of the message were done with Claude Code. It was "under my direction", he writes. The measurements, though, ran on his own machine.
So, will AI replace developers? October's job postings give a better answer than yes or no.
TL;DR: in the United States, developer job postings are up 21% in a year. In France, they are down 9%. What comes back is mostly senior roles and AI-related roles. The work has moved: the agent executes, the human decides and checks. An AI does not have your company's context, and it does not answer for its mistakes. You do.
This article is for small business owners who wonder whether they should still hire a developer. It is also for developers who worry about their job. No technical background is needed.
In the US, postings have been rising for a year and a half
The job site Indeed publishes a daily index of software development postings. A value of 100 matches the level of February 2020, just before Covid. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis makes the series freely available.
In the United States, the index stood at 64.3 on 9 October 2025. It stands at 78.1 on 9 October 2026. That is 21% more postings in a year.
The low point was in May 2025, at 61.1. So the recovery has been going on for almost a year and a half.
Keep the scale in mind, though. In February 2022, at the peak of the hype, the index was above 233. Companies are hiring again, but about three times less than back then.
In France, they are still falling
The same index stood at 57.0 in France a year ago. It is at 51.7 today. That is 9% fewer postings.
The French low point came in early July 2026, at 49.9. It arrived more than a year after the US low. Since then, the index has only gained 3.6%. That is too little to call it a recovery.
Apec, the French agency for managerial jobs, still sees growth. It expects 61,160 hires of IT professionals with manager status in 2026, 4% more than in 2025. The two numbers do not measure the same thing. Indeed counts online ads. Apec asks companies about the hires they plan.
My reading is that France follows the US with a delay. The gap between the two low points is more than a year. Nothing guarantees that the recovery will follow at the same pace.
What comes back is the roles that decide
Not all postings recover the same way. In July, Indeed Hiring Lab, Indeed's research team, analysed the US rise from May 2025 to May 2026. According to them, 71% of that rise came from senior roles. And 37% came from postings with "AI" in the title.
Laura Ullrich leads economic research at Indeed for North America. She puts it this way: "These would not be your software development jobs of yesteryear."
A survey by Harness, a deployment tooling company, points the same way. More than four developers out of five say that the time saved on coding goes into reviewing AI output.
Where postings rise, they look for people who decide and check. Not only people who write code.
My own day changed the same way
I have been a developer for seven years. Today, when I work with an agent, I hand it the execution. We often look for a plan together. But I do not let it decide the plan on its own.
Before starting anything, I talk with my colleagues. I look at how they are doing on their part and on their user stories. I check whether there is something we need to do together.
My role is to think about the architecture and to make the right call. How we will do it, and why. Then I let the agent carry out that decision.
Torvalds describes the same split. The agent wrote. He directed, and he ran the measurements himself.
I am not an isolated case. According to the 2026 Stack Overflow survey, 73% of developers who use AI assistants use them every day. And 66% of respondents use coding assistants or agents.
AI does not have your company's context
An AI model only sees what it is given while it works. That is its context window. It is large, but it is still limited.
You have the full context of your company. You know what a customer told you on the phone yesterday. You know when some news changes things for your market. The agent does not know, unless someone tells it at the right time.
That is why people remain essential in a company. They are the only ones with the full context when a decision is made. This limit of AI even makes their role more important than before.
AI almost always says yes, and you are the one who answers for it
An agent rarely pushes back. Ask it for a bad idea, and it gets to work with care.
And if the agent makes a blunder, you will not go to Anthropic or OpenAI and tell them they broke your business. You are the one who let the agent choose for you. You are the one who answers to your customers.
An agent can write, run and send. It cannot carry the responsibility. So someone has to direct and check. That someone is a human.
So, should you still hire a developer?
My honest answer is that it depends.
With AI, a business owner can do a lot alone. Not only code. Communication, marketing and design too. You can even write your own application if you want to.
But someone has to direct the agents and check their work. If nobody does, it does not work. If you have the time and the distance to do it yourself, you may not need to hire right away.
So the real question is not "AI or developer". It is "who, in my company, directs the agents and answers for their work?". US postings say the same thing: companies hire people to decide and check.
The checklist
Before you hire, or hand everything to AI, go through these points.
- [ ] Name the person who decides what the agent will do
- [ ] Name the one who checks the result before it reaches a customer
- [ ] Make sure they know your company well enough to tell the agent no
- [ ] Decide who answers for an agent's mistake, before it happens
- [ ] Count the hours per week you can spend on it yourself
- [ ] If a box stays empty, that is where you need someone, employee or freelancer
- [ ] Before believing a headline about the end of developers, look at real postings in your country
What to remember
AI writes more and more code. That does not mean it replaces developers. In the US, postings are rising, but for roles that decide and check. In France, the recovery is not there yet.
The job has moved. The agent executes. The human keeps the context, the decision and the responsibility.
Wondering who should direct the agents in your company, or whether you need a developer for that? Let's talk.
Sources: Phoronix, Torvalds and Claude Code (11/10/2026) · Indeed, software development postings, United States (FRED) · Indeed, software development postings, France (FRED) · Indeed Hiring Lab, AI and Job Postings (08/07/2026) · CIO Dive, Laura Ullrich and the Harness survey · Le Monde Informatique, Apec 2026 forecast · Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2026
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