Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu: All of us in software need to figure out how to stay relevant; the point is …

Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu has urged people working in the software industry to think about how they can remain relevant as AI takes on more tasks that were traditionally handled by humans. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Sridhar Vembu said AI could produce a “very large fraction” of software code competently and correctly in the future. Vembu was responding to former Exa AI CEO William Bryk, who argued that AI could potentially surpass humans in mathematics within months. Vembu said the issue is not simply whether AI will do everything, but “how many humans are needed” in the process. He ended with a message to software professionals: “All of us in software need to figure out how to stay relevant.”

Sridhar Vembu on AI and the future of software jobs

In the post, Sridhar Vembu said AI’s progress in mathematics offers a clue about where software development could be heading. According to him, the part of mathematics that works like Chess or Go, where the goal is to find increasingly effective moves within an existing set of rules, could be conquered by AI.He said the harder task is creating an entirely new game or mathematical system that humans would consider interesting. However, he added that humans themselves do this very rarely.

Sridhar Vembu: AI could produce a large share of software code

Sridhar Vembu said programming could fall somewhere between these two areas. He wrote that it increasingly seems that a “very large fraction of software code could be produced competently and correctly by AI.”He highlighted the importance of being able to verify AI-generated code. Vembu pointed to Lean, a proof system already used for mathematical theorem proving, and said such systems could soon be applied to software code produced by AI. This could allow AI to generate code while verification systems check whether the code is correct.

Sridhar Vembu: The key question is how many humans will be needed

Sridhar Vembu said the future does not necessarily mean that AI will handle every part of software development. “The point is not that ‘AI will do it all’,” he wrote.Instead, he said the more important question is “how many humans are needed” as AI becomes capable of handling a larger share of the work. That shift could affect developers and other software professionals whose work includes writing, testing and reviewing code.Vembu also pointed to the difference between mathematics and software engineering. He said software development is connected to a “messy complex physical world” involving people, emotions and group dynamics. That means AI could become extremely capable at writing code without necessarily replacing every human role involved in building software.Vembu ended his post by directly addressing people working in the software industry. “All of us in software need to figure out how to stay relevant,” he wrote, before adding, “Let me get back to work. Please wish us luck 🙏.”