Amid the growing debate around AI replacing human jobs, Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu has made his stance clear. Taking to X (formerly Twitter), the tech leader urged software engineers to start planning an alternate career, not out of panic, but out of practicality.
“At this point, it is best for those of us who depend on writing code for a living to start considering alternative livelihoods. I include myself in this. I don’t say this in panic, but with calm acceptance and embrace,” Vembu wrote in a post that has since sparked widespread discussion in the tech community.
AI is rewriting how we build software.
Vembu’s comments came in response to an X user who shared that they had created a Bhagavad Gita app for the App Store without knowing a single line of code, thanks to AI tools. The Zoho founder used the post as an example of how quickly AI is lowering the barrier to software creation, potentially threatening millions of coding jobs.
In his thread, Vembu cited the recent progress made by Anthropic’s Claude, which reportedly built an entire C compiler on its own. For context, a C compiler is a tool that converts human-written C code into machine-readable instructions, a task typically requiring deep programming expertise.
“The fact that AI models can now build such complex tools shows how fast the technology is advancing,” Vembu said. “This is not science fiction anymore.”
The Zoho founder added that he recently spent hours conversing with Google’s Gemini AI to understand how the global economy might evolve in this new era.
“It was like having a brilliant economic philosopher debating you,” he said. “I asked it to critique its own work, and it did a fantastic job too.”
Vembu said both he and Gemini arrived at two possible futures for AI: one in which access is democratised and productive, and another in which a few companies monopolise the technology and collect rent on its use.
The end of the coding comfort zone
Vembu’s warning to coders is not his first cautionary take on the AI revolution. In recent months, he has criticised the hype around so-called “vibe coding”, the growing trend of using natural-language prompts to generate entire software applications. According to him, it’s an oversimplification of a complex craft that leads to “unsustainable technical debt.”
“Vibe coding just piles up tech debt faster and faster until the whole thing collapses,” Vembu said in a previous post, responding to a public spat with Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, who had provocatively claimed that Zoho’s business model would be among the first to collapse due to AI-based coding.
Ironically, last month, Vembu was still on the other side of the debate. He reflected on how AI is changing the career structure within tech companies. He argued that while AI makes senior engineers and architects more productive, it simultaneously reduces the need for junior developers.
That, he warned, poses a long-term risk. “If we don’t have junior engineers, we don’t get to train the next generation of architects. After all, how does someone become a software architect without being a junior engineer first?”
It’s a fair question, and one that goes beyond coding. The AI boom, Vembu suggests, isn’t just transforming how we work, but who gets to learn and grow in an increasingly automated world.
Vembu says he’s still “thinking through how this gets resolved”, but his message to the global developer community is clear: the era of AI-driven automation is here, and the smart move is to adapt or start planning for what comes next.
