India to dethrone US for dev numbers as AI reshapes coding, says GitHub

The Indian software developer community will outgrow the US's by 2030, GitHub's Octoverse 2025 report shows. However, today, the United States remains in the lead. The repo platform's latest study also details how AI is reshaping the developer world, from the choice of languages and projects to how coders are incorporating the …

[VoiceOfTruth]

Very dubious numbers

>> Dev numbers... However, today, the United States remains in the lead.

I doubt that. Very much. A quick search on Google tells me China is "...the largest software developer base in the world."

[thames]

Re: Very dubious numbers

They are claiming that there are 28 million software developers in the US. The US labour force is 170 million. So they say that 16 per cent of the US labour force work as software developers. I found that claim to be a bit doubtful.

Next they claim that the number of US software developers will rise to 54.7 million within 5 years, resulting in nearly 1 in 3 workers in the US being a software developer. This is even more implausible.

Official US statistics give numbers that are roughly 15 times smaller.

What is more probable is that this "report" was created using an AI which simply made the numbers (and everything else) up out of thin air.

[MonkeyJuice]

Re: Very dubious numbers

Yes, but those numbers are not reflected in the GitHub userbase demographics, hence they are not mentioned here.

[lv426_dallas]

Population is huge

Well yeah, it's no surprise really. With a population of 1.5 billion plus, these guys can dethrone most fields eventually. Compare that to the population of United States, or that of the miniscule Canadian IT industry.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry.

To me that just means that there are more Indian 'so called' Devs that are better at using something to produce code for them with no real understanding of what that code does and whether or not it works correctly.

I already see this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Quantity does not mean quality, esp. if AI involved.

The only reason is cheapness compared to North America and Europe. Corporations and Governments complicit in undermining their economies and tax bases by off-shoring and outsourcing to cheap, disposable labour with no unions, few bendits, no healthcare* and few employment rights. 1 or 2 steps above scam factories in Burma.

* Noted universal healthcare in Canada and Europe.

[Anonymous Coward]

Enshittification

Appears to me like there's a definite correlation between the increasing number of Indian "Software Developers" and the degree of enshittification and piss-poor quality we have to deal with on a daily basis.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Enshittification

That's on management.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares. My schlong is bigger than yours. Blah blah blah.

[frankyunderwood123]

dubious numbers …

My deep research (1 minute) gets a figure of 4.4 million software engineers in the US.

Perhaps the term used, “current coding community” uses figures from github active user accounts. If so, the figure is meaningless in terms of software production. I have 3 github accounts, 2 of which I haven’t used in years.

As for AI use, the acceleration of using AI for coding is alarming and does not bode well for code quality and system stability globally.

It feels like less than a year back it was all fairly experimental - alpha/beta at best - now it’s been adopted at scale for production code.

Indian code quality?

In my experience it can be shockingly bad, but often mitigated by some serious talent and a work ethic plus desire to learn which is alarmingly high when compared to the complacency of western devs.

A case of watch this space, unless of course AI is feeding off all this poor code, in which case enshitification will continue at pace.

[Jerryjie]

I recently use AI agent named Cursor to help me with my project. it was absolutely amazing. it is not like Github copilt that only helps you to predict next code block or explain the code. it helps you to build entire software stack/architect. if you want to add a module, it does it for you in a minute. If this is the trend, then the question is - AI capability will for sure improve itself overtime. people who have no experience can do coding. because of that, more coders, without any or little coding experience, will be joining "programming"

[druck]

I hope you've created an agenic AI bot to create forum accounts and post shit like that, and you aren't wasting your own time.

[joqqy]

Joqqy

Sounds like you are doing marketing for Cursor.

And, if you think predicting the next code block, or explaining code, is all that copilot can do, the obviously you haven’t used copilot, or is not up yo date of its recent capabilities.