The funniest part about working in AI right now is how far the push for AI tools is from reality. On paper, we are in a golden age. Every sprint looks faster with AI coding tools like Cursor and Copilot. Every manager walks around with the confidence of a man who thinks AI is pair programming with the universe.
Inside the codebase, it smells like a landfill.
A Reddit post on r/developersIndia summed this up without poetry. “My manager thinks Copilot is saving 40% time. It’s actually just hiding our tech debt,” wrote a developer. He wasn’t exaggerating. You can feel this everywhere—across companies, across teams, across Slack channels full of late-night commits that no one understands.
Developers know exactly how this plays out. Generative AI code is great for boilerplate. That is not the debate. But, that’s not what management sees. They see speed and demos. They see timelines shrinking without any understanding of what is rotting under the surface.
Read: AI’s Boilerplate Boom: Faster Code, Deeper Debt
The Reddit thread was a long, chaotic session to vent out. People weren’t arguing, but confessing. One said his PRs were full of “correct but bad code I don’t fully get.” Another said their review backlog exploded because AI doesn’t understand restraint.
Someone else said the juniors just paste whatever Copilot throws at them. The AI writes a 300-line function, and everyone pretends that’s normal.
It runs, so ship it. If something breaks, there’s always a guy who says, “Just ask the model why it broke.”
That is the tragedy. People are not using AI, they are surrendering to it.
CTOs Fed Out Entire Codebase to an AI Model
Indian developers are now being forced to use AI tools such as Cursor and Copilot, but they don’t understand the code it generates. They trust it because management has started measuring “AI usage.” According to recent reports, Indian IT firms are also tracking how employees are using AI tools, in some sense to track the efficiency and productivity of the team.
One software engineer at an Indian firm, seeking anonymity, told AIM that apart from Copilot, they are also being forced to test vibe coding tools for faster efficiency. In a similar case on Reddit, a CTO fed the entire repo into a model during a live demo. He pushed the whole thing in front of employees while bragging about how AI could now handle “routine work.”
Then he told HR to track which developers prompt well and which ones don’t. “We need to start tracking AI usage per developer. If someone isn’t leveraging AI efficiently, maybe they aren’t the right fit for this new era,” the Redditor said.
Adithya S Kolavi, founder of CognitiveLabs, said that he believes that it is important for developers to learn AI tools to stay relevant in this era. “If you are not using AI as a coding assistant in this age, it will be hard to catch-up with people who are,” he said.
Read: Indian Companies are Forcing Developers to Use Cursor
Companies used to judge developers by architecture. Then by velocity. Now, they judge them by how many times they press ‘tab’.
In certain cases in the past few months, CEOs have also started firing developers who were not using AI. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong admitted that he fired engineers who refused to sign up for the company’s AI coding tools. Former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke has been just as blunt. “Either you embrace AI, or get out of this career.”
Faith-based Engineering
Developers are faster at starting features and slower at shipping quality. That is the paradox. GenAI accelerates the beginning and drags the end. The PRs and review time get longer. Debugging gets harder because the author didn’t write the logic, the model did.
And this is happening everywhere. Not because AI is bad, but because companies think AI is magic. The moment leadership believes Copilot gives you a 40% productivity boost, the damage begins. Developers stop pushing back. They stop asking for clarity. They stop rejecting inflated requirements.
When a tool promises speed, managers stop respecting complexity. Jargon and nuance disappear. They think everything is possible in two weeks because “the AI wrote a draft.”
The truth is that AI doesn’t remove tech debt. It hides it. It wraps it in syntactically correct sentences. It covers it in clean-looking abstractions. It makes everything look neat until someone tries to debug it.
Managers will celebrate their 40% savings. Until the day the entire stack goes down for reasons no one understands. Then everyone will realise the truth. You don’t get free speed. You get speed borrowed from the future, with interest.
The post ‘My Manager Thinks Copilot is Saving 40% Time’ appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.
