The number of jobs are increasing, because the number of jobs being filled is rapidly decreasing. So, new job listings are often old job listings reworded to exclude more candidates.
If you have one or two good engineers (not programmers, not developers... honest to goodness engineers) who with AI can keep 15-20 tasks running simultaneously (the cost is GPUs and screens), you don't need to hire someone right now.
Companies want the best they can get. They don't want to fill seats anymore. If they already have a few developers, the LLMs are increasing their productivity 10-20x (yes, real engineers who learn LLMs and how to use them as though they're programming languages get that kind of gain), then they can hold out.
Here's a great one for you... I would never hire anyone without a great GitHub now. I want to see projects and I want to see both hand written code and LLM generated code. I want to see external projects they've patched to see if they can work on other peoples code. I want to see student/professional projects (things with deadlines) AND fun projects.
I'm in no rush. I will post a job, if I don't find someone great, I'll change the posting and wait again. LLMs will give me the buffer I need.