David Sacks, head of AI and crypto policy at the White House, posted on May 25 that despite AI’s widespread adoption in code generation, hiring for software engineers continues to rise—largely because lower coding costs have driven up overall demand for software. Citing data showing a 14-fold year-on-year increase in GitHub commits—which is still accelerating—Sacks argued this signals the beginning of a productivity boom as customized software spreads across the entire economy. He used this reasoning to challenge the prevailing narrative that ‘AI will cause mass unemployment.’ Indeed data also shows job postings for developers have been on the rise since September 2025.
The post garnered over 1.1 million views, with roughly equal numbers of supportive and critical comments. Supporters—including Michele Catasta from Replit and Beff Jezos from the e/acc community—maintained that AI empowers each engineer to be far more productive, prompting companies to hire more staff. Critics, however, questioned whether the surge in GitHub commits merely reflects piles of low-quality code generated by LLMs, and took issue with equating commit volume directly to real software value. Clément Delangue, co-founder of Hugging Face, also shared the post; Elvis (@omarsar0) added that the same trend applies to research roles as well.