Will AI eat up career of coders? Rs 9,000 crore company founder claims most techies lack complexity, write 'boiler plate' codes

Last year, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang added fuel to the fire when he stated that in the near future, kids may not need to learn how to code, as AI will do the task.

However, Sridhar Vembu begs to differ.

Taking to X, the Zoho founder-chief scientist shared his take on the AI-endangering engineer’s livelihood debate. “When people say «AI will write 90% of the code,» I readily agree because 90% of what programmers write is «boiler plate,” he wrote.
“There is „essential complexity“ in programming and then there is a lot of „accidental complexity,” he added.
He explained that artificial intelligence is highly effective at eliminating unnecessary layers of complexity, but human expertise remains essential for addressing the core, fundamental challenges.

According to him, AI excels at recognizing and processing patterns that humans have already uncovered. However, the real question is whether AI possesses the ability to identify entirely new patterns. Just as with human intelligence, such discoveries are far less common and require an innate sense of “intuition,» «judgment,» or the ability to «pursue a gut feeling with conviction.» Whether AI can develop this capability—or if it can be achieved through sheer computational power—remains uncertain to him.

Netizens Reaction

Responding to Vembu’s post, one X user observed, “AI will magnify the gap between developers who can design systems well and those who merely translate requirements to code. The former will become more valuable and powerful; the latter will find