Zoho Sridhar Vembu warns engineers over AI coding: ‘Driving too fast in a fancy new car’

Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu has cautioned software engineers against becoming overly dependent on artificial intelligence (AI), saying the technology should assist developers without replacing their understanding of the systems they work on.

In a post on X, Vembu said engineers should make use of AI tools but continue to exercise their own technical judgement and understand the work being produced.

His comments came in response to a post by a software engineer who described how Anthropic’s Claude Code was being used at a large company to handle several parts of the software development process.

‘Never cede our understanding to AI’

The engineer claimed that AI was being used to produce specifications, code, tests, product requirement documents (PRDs), tickets, ticket resolutions 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.

Vembu responded to the post, saying, “This is sad. I tell our engineers to use AI but never cede our understanding to AI”.

He also cautioned that the software industry could be moving towards AI-powered development at a pace that may outstrip people’s understanding of the technology and its consequences.

“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 teams are under pressure to ‘just ship’

The engineer also described the workload and pressure faced by employees as AI tools accelerate software development.

According to the post, employees were working 12 to 13 hours a day, much of it spent giving instructions to AI tools rather than directly writing or analysing code.

The engineer claimed that workers had limited time to review AI-generated code or understand how different components of the software interacted with one another.

“People are working 12 to 13 hours a day just to press enter,” the engineer wrote.

The post also questioned whether faster software delivery was coming at the cost of problem-solving and technical understanding.

“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.