Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu flags AI coding ‘productivity paradox’; says ‘Hundreds of billions of dollars are being…’

Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu has shared concerns about the growing use of AI-generated code in software development, saying the technology may be increasing the amount of code developers produce without creating a matching rise in real productivity. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Vembu reposted comments from François Chollet – founder of intelligence science lab NDEA, who argued that while developers are now shipping far more code with the help of AI tools, the actual value created has not increased significantly. The discussion reflects a wider debate in the technology industry as companies invest billions of dollars into AI coding assistants and developer tools.

AI contributing less to developer productivity

In the post, Chollet suggested the real gains may be far smaller. “The quantity of code that devs ship has roughly 10xed,” Chollet wrote on X. “But net developer productivity (value created by unit of time) is only up by a bit, if at all.” He added that one reason is that developers may now be solving smaller or more incremental problems with the extra code being generated. Chollet also said some of the newly generated code may itself create additional issues that developers later need to fix.“A bigger part is that the new code is creating problems of its own,” he wrote.Responding to the post, Vembu highlighted a comment from Hacker News that described large language model-generated code as being “capable of applying [an] incredible amount of knowledge while having virtually no real understanding of the problem.”According to Vembu, the comment captures what he called the “developer productivity paradox” currently facing the software industry.

“It is capable of applying [an] incredible amount of knowledge while having virtually no real understanding of the problem”Comment from Hacker News on LLM generated large scale code.This and the quoted post below summarise the developer productivity paradox the software industry is grappling with today.Hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested with the premise that software engineering productivity can go up 10x or more. So far at least, productivity gains are small.Interesting times ahead.The discussion comes at a time when major technology companies are investing heavily in AI systems designed to help developers write code faster. Many firms believe AI tools could improve software engineering productivity by as much as ten times.