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The postings behind “One Engineering Posting in Five Now Has an Opinion About Your AI Tools”

Read on 15 September 2026 from the public Greenhouse, Ashby and Lever job-board APIs of 179 technology companies (387 board names were tried; 191 answered with at least one posting; 179 carried software engineering roles). A posting qualified when its title described a software, data, machine learning, security, platform, mobile, infrastructure or forward-deployed engineering role and was not a management, sales, solutions, developer-relations, hardware, research or design role. Interns and new-graduate roles are kept and marked. That left 4820 postings.

Every sentence in every posting that named an AI coding tool (Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Codex, Windsurf, Devin and others) or used a phrase about AI-assisted development, coding agents or AI tools was pulled out with the heading it sat under: 4,401 sentences, 2,332 of them distinct once whitespace and case are ignored, because company boilerplate repeats across a board. Each distinct sentence was then labeled by a language model (Claude) against written instructions: required when the candidate is asked to already use or be proficient with AI coding tools; preferred when that is explicitly a bonus; expected when the posting states that engineers use AI tools in their work or that the hire will, without listing it as a qualification; provided when the company offers the tools, a budget or access; hiring policy when the sentence is about AI in the interview process; building AI when the job is about shipping AI products rather than using coding tools; and context for company descriptions, customer lists and product marketing. A posting takes its strongest label in the order required, preferred, expected, provided, so a posting that both requires the skill and offers the tools counts as required; the by-company table and the rows below still show its provided sentence. One judgment call was applied after the model pass: a Cloudflare sentence that repeats in the company description of all 60 of its postings (“We value candidates who have the instinct to spot a normalized problem and the AI-native curiosity to create a solution using the latest tools”) was moved from required to expected, because it is a values statement rather than a listed qualification. An independent second pass over a random sample of 100 labeled sentences agreed with 98 of the labels; both disagreements were between expected and a non-usage label, none involved required. The sample with both judgements is published as agreement-sample.json, and every labeled sentence is printed below so any row can be re-judged.

Seniority comes from the title (intern, junior, senior, staff and principal; a title with no marker counts as mid, which makes that bucket the noisiest). Work mode comes from the location field. The published date is the board’s own field for the posting: first_published on Greenhouse, publishedAt on Ashby, createdAt on Lever. All three boards let a company edit a posting in place without changing that date, so a posting can carry an early date and later text. Tool counts merge “GitHub Copilot” and a bare “Copilot” only where the article says so; the table below keeps them apart.

The same rows as data: postings.json. The sweep, normalisation, labeling and analysis scripts are in the site repository under growth/research/ai-tools-postings.

Summary

By seniority

By publication month

Postings still open on the read date, grouped by the month the board says they were published. Months with fewer than 40 postings are folded into “earlier”.

By quarter, three ways

All postings; postings with Cloudflare removed; and the mean of per-company shares over companies with at least five postings published in the quarter, so that no single board can carry the number.

Restricting to the 27 companies with at least five postings published in both the first and the third quarter, so the comparison is within the same boards:

Tools named

Counted only in sentences labeled required, preferred, expected or provided, so a company describing its own product or its customers does not count.

By company

All 4820 postings

One row per posting. The evidence column quotes every sentence labeled required, preferred, expected, provided or hiring policy, with the heading it sat under; the posting’s own label is the strongest of them. Rows with no candidate-facing sentence show the company, title and link only.