In changed stance, Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu says AI won’t replace software engineers

Per Zoho chief scientist Sridhar Vembu, AI is effective at writing “glue code” but still relies on experienced engineers to steer it through prompts, intervention, and domain knowledge. A recent review of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 showed that while the model is powerful, the generated code was fairly simple, with only a fraction being complex and unnecessarily verbose.