Sridhar Vembu has a big warning for software engineers amid AI layoffs: 'Nobody knows anything here'

Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu has cautioned software engineers against becoming overly dependent on artificial intelligence for coding and development, urging them to use AI tools while retaining a strong understanding of their own work.

Vembu made the comments in an X post while responding to a software engineer who described how Anthropic’s Claude Code was being used at a large company. According to the engineer, AI was being relied on across almost the entire software development process, from writing specifications and code to creating 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.


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

The Zoho founder also warned that businesses could be moving towards AI-powered coding tools faster than engineers can understand the consequences of their adoption.

“As an industry, we are driving too fast in a fancy new car we barely understand how to drive, inviting disaster,” Vembu stated.

Engineer raises concerns over AI-driven coding

The software engineer’s post also highlighted concerns over how AI-assisted development could increase pressure on employees to deliver more code in less time.

The engineer claimed that employees were working 12 to 13 hours a day while spending much of their time instructing AI tools rather than writing or understanding the code themselves. According to the post, workers had little time to review AI-generated code or understand how different components of the software interacted.

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

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“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.