Codex analyzes eight years of HN hiring posts: AI mention rate rises to 50%
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LanceJones used Codex to perform semantic analysis on eight years of Hacker News "Who's Hiring?" posts and published charts, saying that 50% of posts in 2026 mention AI or machine learning, compared with 17% in 2019. The same analysis also shows that the share of front-end positions has fallen to 3%. These figures come from LanceJones's semantic classification of the posts, not official statistics.
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- Hacker News AIShow HN: 8 years of "Who's Hiring?" in charts (hiring boom, bust, and AI trends)
The author used Codex to run semantic analysis on eight years of Hacker News "Who's hiring?" posts, from pre-COVID through October 2026, retrieved via the HN API. Five findings: AI or machine learning appeared in 50% of 2026 posts (up from 17% in 2019); 53% of identified employers appeared in only one of the 94 monthly threads; frontend roles fell from 16% to 3% of posts; staff-level posts rose from 77 in 2019 to 277 in 2026; and only 41 of 2,932 posts in 2026 explicitly named junior roles, versus 163 in 2019. The post also lists 20 other trends.
Activity for this story
- Current comparable activity
- 3
- Peak comparable activity
- 10Nov 4 02:00
- Change in the past 24 hours
- -50%
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