🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

Higher pay for AI skills comes from demand across the economy

• Higher pay for AI skills comes from broad hiring demand. In Singapore, 49.3% of job vacancies in 2025 were new roles created as businesses expanded 2.
• AI is a large part of that hiring. In January, 23% of Singapore job posts on Indeed mentioned AI, above the US at about 5% and the UK at about 7% 3.
• The need reaches beyond tech. Banks are building AI risk models. Public hospitals use AI for diagnostics. Logistics firms build route planning systems. These projects create software roles 4.

AI skills are reshaping software jobs and pay

• The premium covers more than model building. It also rewards people who use new AI tools that change how software gets made 1.
• Agentic coding assistants such as Claude Code, an AI tool that can help write and test software with limited human direction, can speed up work. Claude produced a proof of concept in one hour for a distributed systems problem, software that runs across multiple machines, after a Google engineering team had worked on it for a year 5.
• That shifts the slowest step from writing code to checking it. Faros, a software engineering data platform, found AI-assisted developers merged 98% more pull requests 6. Pull requests are proposed code changes. Review times still rose 91%, which pushed teams to change how they review code 6.