Zoho's Sridhar Vembu warns engineers against coding AI: 'You're driving too fast in a fancy new car'

Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu has warned software engineers against over-reliance on artificial intelligence (AI), saying the technology should help developers without replacing their understanding of the systems they work on.

In a post on X, Vembu said engineers should use AI tools but still apply their own technical judgment and understand the work being produced.

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

“Never hand over our understanding to AI”

The engineer claimed that AI is used to create specifications, code, tests, product requirements documents (PRDs), tickets, ticket resolutions and reports.

“No one here knows anything. Specs, code, tests, PRDs, tickets, resolution of those tickets, messages, etc., everything is done by Claude Code. No one on my team likes it. They are forced to deliver as much as possible,” the engineer wrote.

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

He also warned that the software industry could be moving towards AI-based development at a pace that may outpace understanding of the technology and its implications.

“As an industry, we are driving too fast in a fancy new car that we barely understand how to drive, which is causing disaster,” Vembu said.

Engineer says teams are under pressure to ‘just ship’

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

According to the post, employees worked 12- to 13-hour days, most of which was spent giving instructions to AI tools rather than directly writing or analyzing code.

The engineer claimed that workers had limited time to look at the code generated by the AI or to understand how different parts of the software interacted with each other.

“People work 12 to 13 hours a day, just hit enter,” the engineer wrote.

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

“There is no sense of victory. No one fixes bugs. No one actually thinks anymore. Everything is done by LLMs. It’s so soul-sucking. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind if we at least got time to review the code and figure out what’s going where. But no, the goal is to just ship. No matter what happens,” the engineer wrote.