Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu has warned engineers against relying too heavily on AI for software development. In a post shared on X, Vembu said that engineers should use AI tools without giving up their own understanding of the work. Vembu was responding to a post by a software engineer who described the use of Anthropic’s Claude Code at a large company. The engineer claimed that AI was being used to create almost every part of the software development process, comprising code, specs, tests, tickets, reports, and product requirement documents (PRDs).
The engineer wrote in his post, ‘Nobody knows anything here. The specs, code, tests, PRDs, tickets, resolution of those tickets, reports, etc., everything is made by Claude Code. Nobody on my team likes this. They are being forced to ship as much as they can.’
On this, Zoho Founder Sridhar Vembu replied, ‘This is sad. I tell our engineers to use AI but never cede our understanding to AI. As an industry, we are driving too fast in a fancy new car we barely understand how to drive, inviting disaster.’ He also warned that firms may be adopting artificial intelligence-powered coding tools faster than engineers can understand their impact.
On the other hand, the engineer’s post regarding the same also raises concerns related to the pressure to deliver more code as AI makes software development faster. As per the post, employees were working 12 to 13 hours a day while spending much of their time directing AI tools instead of writing or understanding the code themselves. The engineer said there was little time to inspect what AI has delivered or understand how different parts of the system worked. He wrote, ‘There is no sense of victory. Nobody is resolving bugs. In reality, nobody is thinking anymore. Everything is done by LLMs. It is so soul-sucking. I would not mind it, to be honest, if we were at least given the time to check out the code and see what is going where. But no, the goal is to just ship. No matter what happens.’