More than a quarter of all computer programming jobs have vanished in the past two years, the worst downturn that industry has ever seen. Things are sufficiently abysmal that computer programming ranks among 10 hardest-hit occupations of 420-plus jobs for which we have data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Learning to code was supposed to save millions of would-have-been liberal arts majors. But today there are fewer programmers in the United States than at any point since 1980. That’s a 45-year period in which America’s total workforce has grown by about 75 percent! It’s so long ago that millennials hadn’t been invented, the oldest Gen Xers were barely in high school, and even many boomers were too young for their first real coding jobs.

The numbers are equal parts apocalyptic and astonishing. Often when we discover this kind of jaw-dropping data, we find it’s not as bad as it looks. As unabashed boosters of both computers and programming, we crossed our fingers that the pattern would repeat itself as we dug deeper.

We started by stepping back until our field of view widened. Most programmers work in an industry that specializes in writing software for corporate clients. And while overall employment has sputtered as that industry has retreated from its early-pandemic excesses, it hasn’t seen the same devastating decline.

More important, when we looked at who worked in that industry, we noticed that programmers were in the minority. They’re dwarfed by, among other occupations, the software developers. The two terms are sometimes used interchangeably, but the jobs follow very different trajectories.

Nationwide, software developers haven’t struggled nearly as much as their programming brethren — few other computer-related occupations have. So what makes programmers different? To answer that, we need to dive forehead first into everybody’s favorite part of any analysis: arcane occupation definitions!

Upon perusing the fine print, we saw that while programmers do in fact program, they “work from specifications drawn up by software and web developers or other individuals.” That seems like a clue.

In the real world, “developer” and “programmer” can seem almost interchangeable. But in the world of government statistics, where we have legal permanent residency, there’s a clear distinction.

In the government’s schema, programmers do the grunt work while the much more numerous — and much faster-growing — software developers enjoy a broader remit. They figure out what clients need, design solutions and work with folks such as programmers and hardware engineers to implement them.

Their pay reflects this gap in responsibilities. The median programmer earned $99,700 in 2023, compared with $132,270 for the median developer. And while 27.5 percent of programming jobs vanished, jobs for developers have only fallen 0.3 percent, similar to the broader industry.

So it’s not just industry-wide headwinds holding programming back. What could account for the difference between the coder collapse and everyone else?

Upon reflection, the solution seemed so obvious that, in the grand tradition of M. Hercule Poirot, we felt like imbeciles for not spotting it sooner. At the end of 2022, just before programmers plummeted, OpenAI released ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot that — much like many data columnists — has always seemed more adept at coding than conversation.

Could this be the first concrete evidence of generative AI replacing workers in the real world? After all, the BLS kinda defines programmers as human coding machines. Other folks feed guidance in one end, and code comes out the other. That sounds an awful lot like what chatbots do.

It’s not the first time programmers have born the brunt of automation. For as long as the BLS has differentiated the two professions, programmers have been the black sheep, always struggling while developer jobs multiplied and multiplied again. With every innovation that made coding easier or less necessary — services to handle common tasks, offshoring, free open-source tools, servers and computing on the cloud — developers took on more of the work once left to pure programmers.

We didn’t want to jump the gun. We’ve seen endless warnings that AI would take our jobs, but until now there’s been precious little evidence that the taking had begun.

Research from folks such as Northwestern University economist Dimitris Papanikolaou and his collaborators has found the job market effects of earlier generations of AI and machine learning to be quite muted. The tools make workers more efficient and perhaps even redundant, Papanikolau told us, but that same efficiency boost also causes the firm to grow, and the growing firm hires more workers. (Not unlike how the laborsaving cotton gin counterintuitively increased demand for the work of enslaved Africans.)

But, he said, it’s entirely possible that some occupations within those firms, such as programmers, might be losing ground as jobs shift to occupations for which AI is more of a complement than a substitute.

For further insight, we rang up our old friend Mark Muro at the Brookings Institution. Muro’s been sussing out strategies to measure the impact of automation and AI on the labor market for nearly a decade now.

He began with the eight sweetest words in the English language: “What you’re seeing makes a lot of sense.”

As AI replaces rote coding tasks and people rely more on snippets generated by models, “the first inroads are going to be for the more routine programming,” Muro told us. “Without getting hysterical,” he added, “the unemployment jump for programming really does look at least partly like an early, visible labor market effect of AI.”

He said his estimates, based on data from OpenAI, showed that the broad occupation category including programmers was among the most vulnerable to AI. Similarly, Indeed Hiring Lab economist Allison Shrivastava found that job postings in the category containing programmers and developers mentioned AI-related terms more often than any other sector on Indeed.

But to tease out the difference between programmers and developers using the latest and greatest evidence, Muro pointed us to a recent report from the California AI outfit Anthropic.

Anthropic researchers analyzed about a million (anonymized) conversations with Claude, the firm’s answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, from late 2024 and early 2025. They matched those chatbot queries to specific activities from achingly detailed task lists the Labor Department has built for each occupation — phlebotomists’ tasks include “Dispose of blood or other biohazard fluids,” while professional divers may “Descend into water” or “Drill holes in rock and rig explosives,” and programmers “Write, update, and maintain computer programs,” among other things.

When they calculated the share of all queries used for tasks related to each of more than 700 occupations, they found people used AI to perform the tasks usually assigned to computer programmers more than those of any other job. Software developers came next, ahead of almost every other profession.

When they calculated the share of all queries used for tasks related to each of more than 700 occupations, they found people used AI to perform the tasks usually assigned to computer programmers more than those of any other job. Software developers came next, ahead of almost every other profession.

To be sure, Anthropic’s Alex Tamkin emphasized that while he sees the potential for AI to have large effects on the labor market, his team’s current analysis wasn’t designed to determine which jobs would be replaced with AI. It just looks at which jobs involve tasks that people are using AI for. In fact, in a majority of cases (57 percent) people are using AI to augment their work rather than to automate it entirely.

“Usage tilts more towards augmentation — which is things like having the AI check your work, asking questions to teach you things, iterating on a piece of work — rather than automation,” Tamkin told us. “And that suggests that right now AI is, on balance, used more as a tool to help you with the work you’re doing rather than automating small chunks of it.”

The overlap between programming job losses, the rise of AI and programmers’ very specific job description certainly seems suggestive, but all our sources reminded us that we can’t lay the entire coder-dammerung at the feet of the chatbots. Programmers have been hammered hardest, but firms across the tech industry have struggled in the past two years as high interest rates and slowing growth made their devil-may-care spending in the early pandemic era look downright devil-may-care.

“Programmers may be more likely than software developers to have more of their job replaced by generative AI, but the sharp decline cannot be attributed to generative AI alone,” Shrivastava told us. She added that Indeed postings for tech jobs such as programmers and developers rose much faster than other job postings amid the 2022 labor market boom and thus had further to fall when the job market cooled.

AI obviously is not a direct replacement for human programmers, given the precision demanded by the profession and the chatbots’ predilection for fabrications. But in the hands of a software developer who knows the code well, the bots could pitch in on some of the grunt work.

It makes us wonder if one day the programmer will go the way of the computer. For centuries, “computer” described a job done by human beings who performed complex computations. Now, it just refers to the machine humans use to handle the math they used to assign to other humans in the computing department.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695363&forum_id=2#48755033)

The "working class" party ladies and gentleman.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695363&forum_id=2#48755105)

remember when libs were sneering about "Learn To Code" for the last 10 years?

lmao

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695363&forum_id=2#48755056)

https://x.com/print__head/status/1901628722958012870

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695363&forum_id=2#48755087)

lmao what kind of "data" are they looking at? there are at least 10x as many being extremely conservative/broad

AI increasingly plays a role of course but all of the layoffs in 2023 were because the Money Printer meant everyone was handing out Free Jobs in 2022. anyone with a pulse who could type "create react app" got tossed 200k+

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695363&forum_id=2#48755132)

https://x.com/print__head/status/1901628722958012870

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695363&forum_id=2#48755163)

"programmers" in this sense are WordPress devs doing the same work an offshore indian does for $9/hr. I have never seen a job posting for this type of work and it's not what was meant by "learn to code"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695363&forum_id=2#48755225)

this is very obviously not true. there is really no point in having "newspapers" or "journalists" if something like this can be printed without someone speaking up.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695363&forum_id=2#48755767)