AI coding tools are making developers dependent on them. Worse, now companies are depending on them, almost forcing developers to use it, and in some cases, even asking them to pay for it. All of this is when the choice should rest with the developers.
On the r/developersIndia subreddit, a post by a young full-stack developer working in an Indian company has struck a chord with hundreds of coders across the country. The developer says his new company has made Cursor mandatory for every engineer.
“They expect features built in a single day,” he wrote. “Even during meetings when I say it’s going to take longer just so I can hand-build it and learn something, they’re like, ‘You have Cursor right, just use that.’”
‘All I Do is Prompt Everyday’
The redditor’s description of the state is very similar to what has been happening in the industry globally. “I thought I was going to learn something here, but all I do is prompt every day. I don’t understand anything that’s going on with the project. I feel like my skills are fading and I hate working here because it feels like I’m one prompt away from either fixing the bug or ruining the app.”
Adithya S Kolavi, founder of CognitiveLabs, agrees that he encourages developers in his company to use AI tools as much as possible, as he 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. “There are things that I have already learnt, and in that scenario, I mainly review the code AI has written.”
“I would go as far as to say, 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, adding that those who have recently started coding would benefit if they avoid using AI tools for every task.
That post now sits among many others from Indian developers describing the same shift: AI-first workplaces where tools like Cursor, Copilot, and Gemini CLI are no longer optional.
Another user, blackpearlinscranton, a backend developer, said their company tracks how often employees use Cursor. “We are warned if Cursor requests are low for more than 3-4 working days,” they wrote. “For the past two months I feel like a bridge who accepted/refined Cursor output and got it merged.”
Many said the shift has killed the joy of problem-solving. “My manager said we can’t code better than AI,” one developer wrote. “It’s been two months and our team is shipping code faster.”
That speed has come at a cost with the quality of the code going down. Even though several developers argue that their productivity has increased several times because of these coding tools, the forced usage of it, raises questions.
Brijesh Patel, founder and CTO of SNDK Corp, earlier told AIM that the answer lies in empowerment, not enforcement. “Developers should be empowered to choose the tools that best align with their work style and the project’s needs,” he said, while adding that no developer in SNDK Corp is forced to use AI tools, but just encouraged to find whatever works best for them.
Push Back?
This comes just days after another viral Reddit post of an Indian developer who said their startup forced employees to pay for Cursor from their own pockets—$20 per month—with promises of reimbursement that never came.
When developers later asked for repayment, the company demanded proof of Cursor usage and test coverage metrics before approving it. “We are being forced to purchase the subscription, use it for company work, and beg for reimbursement,” the post said.
That episode, and now the recent spate of similar posts, point to a new kind of pressure creeping into India’s software workforce. Managers chasing productivity metrics are using AI adoption as a proxy for performance.
Kolavi asserted that companies should sponsor the tools and provide free alternatives as well, instead of asking developers to pay for it. “What matters most is being able to ship useful code as fast as possible. 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 said.
Some developers are quietly pushing back. One Bengaluru-based engineer admitted writing a script to send “nonsensical prompts just to exhaust it,” so management would think he was using Cursor. “If your company expects people to blindly trust whatever slop Cursor produces, then you need to jump ship,” wrote a staff engineer.
But not everyone thinks it’s wrong. Several experienced developers believe AI agents are simply the next phase of programming and also recommend it, though not coax people to use it.
The real skill of a software engineer is not writing code but designing what to write. Some cite the cult saying that AI won’t replace a programmer but a developer who knows how to use AI will.
Read: AI is Taking Over Coding at Indian Companies
Neeti Sharma, CEO of TeamLease Digital, said that many developers have created their own versions of GPT, which is nothing wrong as long as the work is getting done. But, respecting an organisation’s governance laws is also critical, she said.
“Data is of prime importance and data governance and security is very, very critical in today’s day and age. So, if companies are putting in those laws and governances and deciding to use one over the other, I think as employees, we have to follow the governance policies,” she added.
That sentiment is echoed by a growing number of companies branding themselves “AI-first.” Several engineers said they’ve been explicitly told to adopt “AI-first coding” in internal meetings. A backend developer at a fintech company, seeking anonymity, said, “We were literally forced to do vibe coding for production-grade apps.”
For younger engineers, the risk is more personal. The early years that should have been about learning architecture, debugging, and understanding systems are now being spent fine-tuning prompts.
The post Indian Companies are Forcing Developers to Use Cursor appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.
