Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu has warned engineers against relying too heavily on artificial intelligence for software development. In an X post, Sridhar 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, including specifications, code, tests, product requirement documents (PRDs), tickets and reports.“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,” the engineer wrote.Sridhar Vembu quoted and replied “This is sad. I tell our engineers to use AI but never cede our understanding to AI”. He also warned that companies may be adopting AI-powered coding tools faster than engineers can understand their impact.“As an industry, we are driving too fast in a fancy new car we barely understand how to drive, inviting disaster,” Vembu stated.
Engineer says AI is changing software development
The engineer’s post also raised concerns about the pressure to deliver more code as AI makes software development faster. According to 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 code themselves. The engineer said there was little time to inspect what the AI had produced or understand how different parts of the system worked.“People are working 12 to 13 hours a day just to press enter,” the engineer 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,” the engineer wrote.
