Software engineer job postings are going up. Not down.

If you've been following AI influencers who don't write code, you've heard the opposite. "AI is killing software engineering." "Coding is dead." "Engineers won't have jobs in 2 years."

Here's what's happening in the real world.

AI vibe coding made it cheap and fast to create software prototypes. Tools got easier. The barrier to entry dropped. Non-technical teams started building things themselves.

And then they hit reality.

A working product isn't a prototype. There are 50+ tasks beyond writing the first version of code. Testing. Deployment. Security. Scaling. Maintenance. Bug fixes. Infrastructure. Monitoring.

So these non-technical teams start hiring engineers to take over their vibe coded projects.

This is the Jevons paradox in action. When the cost of producing something drops, people don't use less of it. They use more. Way more. The total demand goes up because use cases multiply.

AI didn't shrink the engineering job market. It expanded it. More people are attempting to build software than ever before. And most of them need professional engineers to finish the job.

The loudest voices saying "coding is dead" have never shipped a production system. They built one demo, it worked, and they assumed the whole profession was a demo.

If you're learning to code or already an engineer, your skills are getting more valuable, not less. The people creating the work don't even know they're creating it yet.