Indian Developers Fear They Aren’t Coding Enough Anymore

While Indian companies have been forcing developers to use Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and other coding tools, some developers are realising they are not learning anything anymore, or making their skills even worse.

A front-end developer at an AI startup in Bengaluru, seeking anonymity, told AIM that he uses Cursor to write most of the code and tests out POCs using Lovable. He said that though this allows the company to ship faster and try out more designs, there is very little learning curve left for him apart from mastering these tools.

When he raised the concern about getting time to learn more, his manager told him, “Whatever coding you had to learn you learnt in college. Now is the time to build and ship.”

He added that this is especially worse for junior developers out of universities who are handed AI tools directly. This also leads to a lot of employees leaving the company early, either because they couldn’t learn much, or were simply let go. 

The industry spent years telling developers not to obsess over lines of code, and now it is replacing one vanity metric with another. 

A similar Reddit post on r/developersIndia by user account u/EdgeFamous377 captures this phenomenon better: “I think I’m writing less code… and companies seem weirdly okay with it. Should we be worried?”

The developer also added that they met someone from Anthropic’s sales team recently, who said companies now have dashboards that track prompt quality and how much AI they are using. This way, companies can now track each employee’s AI usage and assess if they are using it enough. 

This kind of metric might make developers uneasy as they worry about being replaced by someone who is adept with these tools. Sharp coding skills are simply not going to be enough.  

What’s the Worry?

Ultimately, developers are writing less code. Not because they got lazy, but because AI now sits in the middle of every workflow, and companies seem more than fine with it, more so, even encourage it. Someone on Reddit said they barely write anything from scratch now. They prompt, inspect, tweak, ship, and repeat.

Adam Wolff, the creator of Claude Code at Anthropic, predicted in a post on X that “maybe as soon as the first half of next year: software engineering is done. Soon, we won’t bother to check generated code, for the same reasons we don’t check compiler output.” He added that it is a little scary that programming won’t be a big part of the job anymore. 

“But coding was always the easy part. The hard part is requirements, goals, feedback—figuring out what to build and whether it’s working,” Wolff said, which sounds eerily similar to what the manager of the Bengaluru startup told the developer.

And the developers who learnt coding before AI tools are on the safer spot. “I’m so glad that I learnt to code before AI. Because it’s like a drug. It’s always there,” Dhravya Shah, the creator of Supermemory, told AIM. Supermemory serves as a universal memory layer that enables developers and users to add memory to their own large language models.

Shah said that his friends who are learning to code now aren’t able to do it properly because AI coding tools exist. If you don’t learn to code without AI, you will eventually end up writing bad code, he said. 

On the other hand, Adithya S Kolavi, founder of CognitiveLabs, believes that not being able to learn coding because of AI is simply wrong. “I started learning more when I started using AI to code,” he told AIM. 

“Let’s say I am exploring a new language framework even though I use AI for coding. I read every single line, go through the documentation and understand what exactly is happening. So I feel you [developers] can learn more with AI,” he explained.

“We had a few interns who were trying to write all the code from scratch, which was actually holding others back who were using AI to code,” he added, reinforcing how important it is to learn to use AI tools.

Similarly, Adarsh Shirawalmath, founder of Tensoic AI and an SGLang developer, told AIM that junior developers often use AI coding tools without understanding what the output code is. “But sometimes the way I’ve seen some engineers use AI, especially working on large projects like SGlang, blows my mind,” he added. Tensoic AI is an open source research lab advancing the state of AI.

“The speed with which experienced developers can ship has gone up exponentially,” Shirawalmath said. This begs the question of how much actual coding is being done now, or even promoted within firms, since output is the only thing that matters.

No One is Shocked

Many senior developers on community forums also admit they use AI all the time. They just do not trust it blindly. One person said if you only toss prompts until something sticks, you are not developing, you are doing prompt engineering. If the model starts to spew nonsense, you should be able to take control and write it yourself. 

This is what Wolff meant as well when he said that software engineering is going to change. But these discussions of Indian developers also captured a deeper anxiety. Juniors who never built strong fundamentals may struggle. Tooling is getting so powerful that it is easy to mistake autocomplete for engineering.

Though there should be a choice for developers to use AI tools or not, those lines are blurring. Developers who expected they would learn programming skills at their first job are now simply learning to use the AI tools, or in other words, learning to prompt.

Developers are not writing less code because they are getting worse. They are writing less because the nature of coding itself is shifting. But, nobody knows yet what that means for careers, learning, hiring, or evaluation. The work gets faster, but the fear gets louder. AI gives you wings, but also raises the bar.

The post Indian Developers Fear They Aren’t Coding Enough Anymore appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

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