Are engineers becoming worthless? Yet the software market is racing toward $58.2 billion: when 180 million people can all build software, AI is turning software creation into the next growth frontier

Are investors planning to stop pouring resources into the software industry? That's actually a huge question mark. Because if we shift our perspective back to the market itself, even though programmer job openings are projected to decline by 7% over the next decade, the population of people making software has surged by 36 million in a single year. So in reality, what AI is pushing down is the price of "writing code," but what it's expanding is the entire software market.

From where I stand, the software market is going through the biggest expansion in its history, and the driving force behind that expansion happens to be the very thing making engineers anxious: AI can now write code. AI has turned the technical language once required for digital environments into ordinary human speech, accelerating the time it takes for two species—humans and digital intelligence—to communicate with each other.

Let me put the conclusion up front. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the "Computer Programmer" occupation will shrink by 7% over the next decade. But at the same time, GitHub added more than 36 million new developers in a single year, and Gartner forecasts the low-code development technology market will reach $58.2 billion by 2029. Put these three numbers together and they're telling the same story: the barrier to entry for writing code has gotten cheaper and easier, so there's more software, and so there are more people making software. One kind of engineering job will disappear, but the software market will grow several times over.

Since starting my company—actually, even earlier, since I wrote my first line of HTML code back in 1995 as a kid—the world I've known has been an accelerating one. Computers aren't fundamentally different from past carriers of human information; they just happen to be able to do a tremendous number of things. They're like radio, television, even film—all carriers of content—except they can do it faster, reach more people, and carry more functions.

When Aotter was founded in 2013, we got involved in a lot of co-creation communities—what people called the Maker community, which was red-hot nearly 15 years ago—using manufacturing equipment that moved from factories into homes, combined with the spread of smartphones and mobile apps, to build a world where products could be made much faster. The same thing happened in the content creator industry: from needing large-scale, expensive production setups, it gradually shrank down to the point where, in a limited space with a green screen, a phone, and some LED lights, you could achieve results close to what a professional studio used to produce. This is a real embodiment of how technology shortens the distance to value creation. The one place where the digital content industry (or what we might call the "brain" industry) has always seemed to lag behind is that technical talent—software engineers—remained scarce, and the market exhibited that classic "scarcity breeds value" phenomenon. Companies with resources or capital, ignoring actual output per person-month, would treat having more engineers as one of their own indicators of capacity or quality assurance—and that, again and again, is a phenomenon that only shows up in a relatively backward industry. Over these past years of writing code myself, building products, and leading teams, I've watched full-stack frameworks come and go, watched simple front-end languages get wrapped in increasingly over-engineered libraries, and then watched the AI era march forward generation by generation—Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, Vibe Coding, Agents. I've become more and more convinced: what's actually shrinking, when you zoom out, is the constraint itself that "only Programmers can create Software."

Below, using five sets of data from authoritative institutions, I'll describe the market shift I'm seeing, and the new role being born within that shift: the Software Creator. I don't even think "Builder" is the right term to describe this role that's been springing up like mushrooms after rain, thanks to vibe coders.

I. Programmers Are Shrinking, Software Developers Are Growing

A lot of people lump "people who write code" together with "people who make software," which is why they end up asking the wrong question.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS) latest 2025–2035 occupational employment projections happen to split these two groups apart:

Computer Programmers are projected to decline by 7%, Software Developers are projected to grow by 10%, and Information Security Analysts are projected to grow by 21%; over the same period, the average growth across all occupations is only 3.5%. The BLS states it plainly on the programmers page: companies will use technologies including AI to automate repetitive programming work, while higher-level work shifts to software developers.

This chart describes a structural shift: "Coding" is getting cheaper, and "Software" is getting more valuable.

As more and more code gets handed off to AI, human value shifts elsewhere. Do you know what problem needs solving? Do you understand how the industry works? Can you turn the requirements of five different departments into a single workflow? Do you know how to model the data? Do you know which decisions can't be left to an Agent? Do you know where things will blow up once they hit production? Go one level deeper: do you understand databases, distributed systems, security, infrastructure?

These capabilities will be worth more than "turning a spec into code."

II. The Definition of "Developer" Is Expanding: 48.4 Million, or 180 Million?

How many developers are there, really? The answer depends on how you count—and the gap between the two ways of counting is exactly what's worth paying attention to in this market.

SlashData estimates 48.4 million developers worldwide as of Q3 2025, up from just over 31 million in early 2022—roughly a 50% increase in a little over three years; among them, professional developers grew from 21.8 million to 36.5 million, a 70% increase. SlashData also notes that the year-over-year growth rate has slowed from 15% and 21% down to 10% in the most recent year, suggesting things may be cooling off.

GitHub's number is on a different order of magnitude entirely. Per the Octoverse 2025 report: the platform now has over 180 million developers, with more than 36 million joining in a single year (a 23% year-over-year increase)—averaging more than one new person per second; nearly 80% of new developers used GitHub Copilot within their first week. Public repos using LLM SDKs now exceed 1.1 million, up 178% year-over-year.

180 million GitHub accounts obviously doesn't equal 180 million professional engineers. Research firms count "people whose profession is development"; GitHub counts "accounts actually building things on the platform." The gap between these two numbers is exactly where the emerging population of Software Creators is growing.

In the past:

Software Creator ≈ Programmer / Engineer

Now it's gradually becoming:

Software Creator
= Engineer + Founder + PM + Designer + Analyst
+ Marketer + Consultant + Operator + Researcher
+ Ordinary users + AI Agents

As far back as late 2022, Gartner predicted: by 2026, developers outside of formal IT departments would account for at least 80% of low-code development tool users, up from 60% in 2021. These people don't have "Software Engineer" on their LinkedIn, but they're making software every single day.

I've deliberately avoided throwing out a number like "how many Software Creators there will be by 2027," because no research institution has done this kind of population forecast yet, and any number I guessed wouldn't be any more credible. But the direction is clear: the professional developer population is still growing but slowing down, while the population of people making software is expanding at a different speed entirely.