I Analyzed 3,000 Developer Job Postings Overnight (Here's What I Found)
Mining product opportunities from the gig economy with Claude Code, Playwright, and ChatGPT Pro.
It started with a simple question: what are people actually paying developers to build right now?
Not the Twitter hype. Not the VC narratives. Real jobs, real budgets, real pain points. The kind of stuff you could productize or solve with a weekend of vibe coding.
So I dug through 3,000 job postings from major gig platforms overnight. Here's what happened.
It Started with Manual Browsing (And Frustration)
I spent about 30 minutes manually scrolling through job listings. Keywords like python automation, ai chatbot, telegram bot, n8n, zapier integration, shopify app, chrome extension...
Tons of interesting stuff popped up. But here's the problem: I'd see something cool, scroll past it, and 5 minutes later couldn't remember what it was or find it again. No system. No way to compare. Just scattered impressions that never formed a big picture.
There had to be a better way.
Enter Claude Code: 30 Minutes to Automation
I fired up Claude Code, described what I wanted, and 30 minutes later I had a fully working data collection system:
- Playwright for browser automation (headless mode, stealth settings)
- undetected-chromedriver as backup for trickier sites
- SQLite for storage
- 48 keywords across dev categories
- $500+ budget filter (serious clients only)
- Deduplication, pagination, error recovery, auto-resume
The system kept hitting walls mid-run (these platforms are hostile to automation), so I switched to headless mode and let it run overnight.
Woke up to ~3,000 job records in my database. Not bad for zero babysitting.
The Annoying Part: These Platforms Are Dinosaurs
Let me rant for a second.
These gig platforms are stuck in 2008.
No public APIs. No RSS feeds. No webhooks. You want structured data? Your options:
- Pay $500+/month for "enterprise API" access (lol)
- Automate browser interactions like a caveman
- Give up
I chose option 2. And these platforms really don't want you collecting data:
- Cloudflare challenges everywhere
- Aggressive fingerprinting
- Login walls for basic search
- Infinite scroll that breaks pagination
- Rate limits after 20 requests
Honestly? If I had a few free days, I could ship an open, API-first alternative. No detection BS. Clean JSON endpoints. Let the data flow. These incumbents are begging to be disrupted.
The Analysis: ChatGPT Pro is Stupidly Powerful
After collecting data, I needed to analyze ~3,000 jobs. Tag them. Score them. Find the patterns.
Original plan: OpenAI API batch processing.
Problem: I'm a proud Claude Code Max and ChatGPT Pro subscriber—I've already paid my AI taxes. But API keys? That means digging through dashboards, copying secrets, configuring .env files... and ironically, it's the one thing CLI tools will refuse to help you with for "security reasons." The only friction point in the entire vibe coding workflow.
Plus the math doesn't work. At $0.01-0.03 per job, that's $30-90 minimum—and probably more if you want actually reliable analysis, not just pattern-matching slop. For a weekend curiosity project? Hard pass.
So I tried ChatGPT Atlas—OpenAI's new agentic browser. The browser itself is actually cool—way faster than Chrome for ChatGPT (no idea why, but regular Chrome sometimes lags hard on chat.openai.com while Atlas is buttery smooth).
But the Atlas agent mode? Garbage. It kept trying to apply generic templates instead of actually thinking. Every response felt like it was trying to bullshit me with boilerplate. Not ready for real work.
But then I just uploaded the SQLite file directly to ChatGPT Pro (regular chat, not Atlas agent mode) and asked it to:
- Filter out irrelevant postings and sketchy clients (~3,000 → 2,000 legit dev jobs)
- Tag each job: category, difficulty (1-5), SaaS potential (1-5), market signal
- Write a 300-800 word analysis for each job
- Generate stats and top lists
- Write everything back to the database
2 hours later: Done. 2,000 jobs fully analyzed. 2000+ pages of deep analysis (~500 chars each). Database updated. All for $0 extra—already paying for Pro.
This is the real unlock. For bulk offline analysis, ChatGPT Pro with file uploads destroys API pricing.
What I Found: The Data
Here's what 2,000 dev-related job postings tell us:
Category Breakdown
| Category | Count | % | Avg SaaS Potential |
|---|---|---|---|
| Data | 600+ | 30% | 2.5 |
| SaaS | 380+ | 19% | 4.0 |
| AI | 360+ | 18% | 3.8 |
| Integration | 240+ | 12% | 3.5 |
| Bot | 210+ | 11% | 2.7 |
| Extension | 80+ | 4% | 3.8 |
| Automation | 80+ | 4% | 3.7 |
Market Temperature
| Signal | Count | % |
|---|---|---|
| Stable | 1,300+ | 64% |
| Rising | 280+ | 14% |
| Hot | 260+ | 13% |
| Niche | 160+ | 8% |
AI is on fire. Most of the "hot" signals cluster in AI-related jobs.
Difficulty Distribution
| Difficulty | Count | % |
|---|---|---|
| 1 (Trivial) | 420+ | 21% |
| 2 (Easy) | 540+ | 27% |
| 3 (Medium) | 420+ | 21% |
| 4 (Hard) | 300+ | 15% |
| 5 (Complex) | 320+ | 16% |
48% of jobs are difficulty 1-2. Easy pickings for anyone with basic dev skills.
Tech Stack Demand
| Tech | Mentions |
|---|---|
| Python | 300+ |
| JavaScript | 300+ |
| React | 140+ |
| OpenAI API | 130+ |
| Shopify | 120+ |
| Node.js | 110+ |
| n8n | 100+ |
| Zapier | 100+ |
Early Insights
A few things jumped out:
AI + automation is the sweet spot. High demand, high budgets ($5k-15k), and most have clear productization potential.
n8n and Zapier are everywhere. Low-code automation isn't a trend—it's the baseline. If you're not fluent in these, you're leaving money on the table.
Shopify ecosystem is quietly lucrative. 120+ jobs, 3.8/5 avg SaaS potential. Themes, apps, integrations—recurring revenue waiting to happen.
"Easy" jobs still pay well. Plenty of difficulty-2 gigs at $800-2000. The skill arbitrage is real.
Bot development is stable but commoditized. Good for consistent income, not for building wealth.
What's Next
This post is just the overview. I'm sitting on 2,000 analyzed jobs with detailed breakdowns. Coming up:
- Productization opportunities: Jobs that are begging to become SaaS
- Vibe coding targets: Problems a solo dev can solve in a weekend
- Easy wins: Low-difficulty, high-paying gigs for quick cash
- Tech deep dives: n8n, Shopify, GoHighLevel ecosystems
- Individual job teardowns: Technical approach + realistic pricing
The data pipeline is now running daily in the background, continuously collecting fresh postings. I'll publish weekly updates as patterns emerge.
Need the raw data or want custom analysis? Reach out—happy to chat.
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