AI was meant to replace software developers. It's creating more instead.

One of the biggest fears about AI was that it would kill tech jobs and shrink the software industry.

The logic seemed straightforward. If AI made developers much more productive, tech companies would need fewer of them. That would mean fewer software subscriptions, known as "seats," because each worker typically has their own account.

Investors also worried that AI coding tools would enable companies to build more of their own software rather than buy it from established vendors.

The software giant Atlassian sat right in the way of these buzzsaws because it sells tools that help teams organize work, collaborate, and build software. That drove the stock down more than 50% in the first few months of 2026.

Now, the picture looks very different.

Atlassian shares jumped 35% on Friday after the company reported surging revenue, helped by growth in seats for its main Jira and Confluence products.

That suggests that AI is creating more roles for software developers, rather than killing tech jobs.

"There's going to be more developers in the world in five years' time than there are today," Atlassian CEO and cofounder Mike Cannon-Brookes said after the results. "Developer hiring will continue to grow."

"The cost of building technology is going down. The amount of technology we're going to build is going to go up," he added. "Those are the signals we see in our customers. The ability to grow that is huge."

This reminds me of something Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said a few years ago. He predicted AI would make writing software much easier, opening this skill to many more people.

"The programming language is human; everybody in the world is now a programmer," he said.

Atlassian is seeing this happen across its corporate customers. The company said seat growth wasn't just coming from software developers. Roughly two-thirds of Jira and Confluence users are now in roles such as human resources, finance, and legal.

"The number of people building technology that we don't necessarily call developers is also growing," Cannon-Brookes said.

In other words, AI may not be replacing developers. Instead, it appears to be expanding who gets to build software.

If that's right, the long-feared collapse in software jobs and subscriptions may never arrive. Instead, AI could create a much larger pool of people building technology, and an even bigger market for companies like Atlassian.

Sign up for BI's Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at [email protected].