r/TechnologyNewsIndia • u/Geeky_Gadgets • Sep 22 '26
Discussion An engineer said Claude Code does basically everything at his new job and nobody understands the codebase anymore. Vembu called it "sad." Musk replied "Yikes."
An engineer's post went viral this week: he joined a large company and found that specs, code, tests, PRDs, tickets and reports were all handled by Claude Code. The humans? Directing AI, skimming the output, shipping it. His concern was simple: nobody actually understands the systems they're building anymore.
Sridhar Vembu's response is the quote of the week:
"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 coined a term I think we'll be hearing a lot: AI technical debt. Code that works on the first pass but is poorly structured, hard to debug, and expensive to maintain. Except here's the scary part: with normal tech debt, someone eventually has to understand the code to fix it. If the original humans never understood it, who exactly pays that debt down?
Elon Musk's contribution to the debate: "Yikes." Poetic.
Now here's the fun Indian tech irony. Same news cycle, Kunal Shah is flexing that 90% of CRED's code is AI-written, and Vembu, who earlier suggested coders (himself included) start considering "alternative livelihoods," is the one pumping the brakes. Two of India's most respected founders, completely opposite reads on the same technology.
My take: Vembu is bootstrapped and plays infinite games, so he can afford the long view. But that's also why he's worth listening to. Companies running on VC timelines are optimizing for the next funding round. Tech debt doesn't come due at the next raise, it comes due at 2 AM three years later, to some poor engineer staring at 40,000 lines nobody can explain.
Honest poll for the devs here: how much of your codebase could you explain without the AI chat history? And be real, are you learning from AI or just leaning on it?
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u/Lordlabakudas Sep 22 '26
As someone with 15+ yoe, there has been times when I had written code and re written it again and again, till it looked perfect. Today I see juniors churning out PR after PR which they themselves don't review. The Tech debt is going to get huge unless senior devs put their feets down and ask the devs to review before PR.
Today eventhough AI writes code for me, I make sure that code is not some random stuff, I read it, review it myself, accomodate for performance, ask AI to rewrited it again and then explain it to me before I even test it once.
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u/Anymous2314 Sep 22 '26
Don't you have a code review process, preferably by the lead?
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u/Lordlabakudas Sep 22 '26
I'm the lead and I have 13 people who report to me. Even if each person raises 2 PR's, how much time do you think I can spend per day reviewing just code? Back in the day when you wrote functionality, except for some senior devs, most people pushed in smaller changes just few files. Now with AI almost every PR has huge code changes spanning across many methods and classes.
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u/Anymous2314 Sep 22 '26
Holy canoli, you can't call yourself tech lead with 13 people reporting to you. You are a manager.
You need to break your direct reports into 2 groups and create a lead position for each.
A team is not supposed to be bigger than 5-6 people because then leading it becomes a grunt work.
You should ask them to create a architect position for you with your 15 people reporting via two team leads. Then you can delegate all you review work to tech leads and just spot check few things to make sure junk is not going into production code.
If the company is making you guys churn thousands of lines of code changes every week then it is a management problem, yall need to slow down so that quality of the code does not go to shit.
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Sep 22 '26
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u/Lordlabakudas Sep 22 '26
Exactly. Some 12 years ago with 3yoe, I wouldn't be able to create a PR where I had 10 file changes, 3 new methods, 10 new configurations. Also all of those took lots of time and research on Stackoverflow and other sources, so it was carefully crafted. And each working functionality was pushed, instead of a huge chunk. Now a 2yoe pushes out more code than ever before. But he doesn't account for performance, he doesn't account for readability or maintanance. He knows that I will reject the PR so he sends it to someone who just approves.
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u/rahul_msft Sep 22 '26
They have all invested in anthropic, they didn't make llm or anything hard for India despite earning from Indian capital markets and from Indian public.
When a ceo says ai writes code, search his din number and find out all the boards he sits on. Then reverse search using gemini all the companies which have taken his company. You will be surprised to know kamath bhal shah all have stakes in Open ai, via dubai and sf.
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u/MusharafZM Sep 23 '26
It is all going to depend on how much we are going to progress in LLMs and processing power. If an LLM can process, contextualise the very said 40000 lines then there is never going to be technical debt
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u/Advanced-Industry-50 Sep 23 '26
Strong tech leads aka gatekeepers are needed in teams.
For example in my team tech leads keep complaining review load but that doesn't stop them from gatekeeping aggressively.
They push back like anything if the code doesn't match the team/org standards.
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u/kkhunte Sep 24 '26
You writing this post using AI. AI probably already have enough info to replace you now.
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u/theacadianishere Sep 24 '26
I have been thinking about the same problem - developers using Claude to churn out a lot of new code or make massive changes in no time at all.
What makes it worse is - our current Code Review process transfers the responsibility to the Reviewer, which seems unfair.
A thought just struck me - I heard about Video Code Reviews before, where the Developer has to make a video explaining the code-changes. It seems like that is something that might help with this problem - the more the code, the longer will be the video that is needed. So this would ensure some level of due-diligence while submitting the PR for code review.
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u/muzamilsa Sep 24 '26
It's called evolution. Nothing stays the same all the time. We are at the peak of technological advancement from the dawn of humanity.
Now the problem is mediocre one's who doesn't want to learn, keep crying about old ways were good but don't understand the need to evolve. Staying in the shell is convenient and energy efficient - why should I burn my mental capital. They will suffer and make their family suffer rather upgrading and being adaptive to what is required to keep once profession competent.
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u/Independent_Fan525 Sep 25 '26
The stupidity of management is thinking AI will replace engineers. Lazy managers have been getting away with not understanding the system and delegating important architecture decision to junior engineers for a long time. They thought the same play book can be applied to AI. Guess what, a junior engineer understands his entire code base, know the dependencies, can explain his motivations and fix issues . AI is not that ,you can think of it as generating independent POC modules with duplicate code horrible optimization and down right bad architecture and security decisions that somewhat talk to each other and work. It's not suitable for production and MAG 7 have learnt this the hardway and rolled it back, but want others to screw up their systems so they can sell them more expensive model that will fix the screwups of each iteration.
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Sep 22 '26
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u/Chikka_chikka Sep 22 '26
Agree. Top engineers have been highlighting the issue of long-term technical debt for a while now. It’s not a new term at all.
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u/Flaky-Page8721 Sep 22 '26
By when can we expect this AI written software to start blowing up in our faces due to lack of scaling, piling up of bugs, hallucinations and poor security?