Рубрика: AI

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.

India’s four new labour codes, introduced between 2019 and 2020 and consolidating 29 earlier laws into a single framework governing wages, social security, working conditions, and industrial relations, were implemented nationwide this month.

For the IT and GCC ecosystem, the new codes have a direct impact on compensation structures, contractor oversight, fixed-term employment, and state-wise compliance obligations.

Earlier, the Provident Fund (PF), the Employees’ State Insurance (ESI) and the Minimum Wages Act used different definitions, allowing employers to distribute pay across allowances to limit statutory contributions.

A significant part of this shift is the introduction of a single, statutory definition of “wages,” replacing the fragmented interpretations under older laws.

This is intended to ensure that employees receive higher statutory benefits, calculated as a certain multiple of their wages.

This includes stronger PF contributions, improved gratuity payouts, clearer minimum-wage protection, timely wage payments, and more predictable severance and retrenchment compensation — by preventing salary structures that dilute the wage base used for these calculations.

Under the new codes, “wages” now include basic pay, dearness allowance (DA), and retaining allowance (RA), and these components must, together, account for at least 50% of total remuneration.
If excluded allowances, such as Housing and Rental Allowances (HRA), bonuses, special allowances or reimbursements, push the non-wage portion above 50%, the excess must be added back and treated as wages.

Legal experts, however, caution against assuming that the codes mandate employers to restructure salaries so that basic pay automatically equals 50% of remuneration.

A note from Khaitan & Co. points out that this interpretation is inaccurate.

Companies are not legally required to redesign salary structures. However, when calculating statutory payments such as retrenchment compensation, overtime or notice pay, the codes require that “wages” used for these calculations be treated as at least 50% of total remuneration — even if the actual basic pay is lower.

However, if companies choose to restructure salaries so that wages account for 50% of total remuneration, the higher PF contributions that follow may prompt them to reduce allowances that are not tied to basic, particularly performance-linked variable pay.

This shift would increase social-security deductions and leave employees with a smaller take-home salary.
Neeti Sharma, CEO of TeamLease Digital, a staffing company, told AIM that in the short run, the cost to the company will increase, and they may look at newer ways to protect their margins.

“At the same time, they will not be able to reduce compensations for existing employees, as the risk of their attrition will be high.”

AIM also reached out to Kanishka Maggon, a lawyer and a partner at Trilegal. “When it comes to social security…the EPF [Employee Provident Fund] act has not been repealed,” he stated.

This means the public is still awaiting clarity on whether PF will be calculated under the new “wage” definition prescribed in the labour codes, which would increase an employee’s social security benefits.

However, several companies and founders expressed a positive outlook towards the new labour code changes, in statements to AIM.

Ankit Agarwal, founder of Unstop, a talent management and hiring company, said, “As a founder, I see the implementation of the four labour codes as a much-needed update to how India manages work and workplaces.”
He stated that for years, businesses have dealt with fragmented and heavy compliance loads, but these reforms bring in a more straightforward process, clear expectations, and a more predictable environment.
Besides the basic pay alignment, the labour code also focuses on several structural changes that affect how IT and GCC employers manage their workforce.

Sharma pointed out that “vendor and contract workforce models will face tighter vigilance as principal employers become more accountable for social security and working conditions.”
The code on social security expands coverage for contract and platform (gig) workers, making principal employers directly accountable for ensuring PF, ESI and gratuity compliance across vendor-led teams.
Fixed-term employees now become eligible for gratuity after one year of continuous service, replacing the earlier five-year requirement and increasing long-term benefit obligations for high-attrition roles.
In addition, the code on wages introduces a statutory floor wage that no state can go below.

It extends minimum-wage and timely-payment provisions universally to 100% of India’s employees — removing earlier coverage gaps that left specific categories of employees outside formal protection.

With regards to the transition that companies now have to make — in terms of reworking contracts, updating payroll terms, training teams and tightening the compliance, Agarwal said that founders should see it as ‘investments, and not burdens.’
“If we get this right, we’ll end up with a workforce that feels more secure and a business ecosystem that’s far more transparent and future-ready,” he added.

The State vs. Central Confusion

Maggon pointed towards how state governments will need to notify their rules before the framework can operate without ambiguity.

“That’s the confusion that employers are grappling with,” said Maggon, adding that the anticipation is that states are going to move fast with the rules.

“Labour is a concurrent subject,” he stated, explaining how many operational details, such as working hours, record formats, and local inspections, still rely on individual state notifications.

He stated an example of how this plays out with working-hour requirements. Under the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions (OSH) Code, 2020, the daily work limit is eight hours, but most state Shops and Establishments Acts still allow a nine-hour workday before overtime is triggered.
In a statement to AIM, Sonal Arora, country manager at GI Group Holding, highlighted the practical challenge. “Rules on floor wages, working hours and welfare provisions will continue to vary, which means organisations operating across multiple regions must stay alert to these differences.”

A report from the law firm Obhan and Associates stated that, “As of late 2025, most states had published draft rules for one or more Codes. However, not all states have finalised or notified their rules. Some states, such as West Bengal, have even lagged in releasing drafts.”

“For instance, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Kerala have notified their respective rules under the Labour Codes, whereas Delhi has notified its rules under the Wage Code and SS Code and is yet to release rules under the IR Code and OSH Code,” stated another report from the law firm DLA Piper.

Arora added that these Codes, while they bring clarity, may struggle with uniformity, and that companies will need flexible systems and real-time oversight to remain compliant across all locations.

“The most effective approach is to maintain a state-wise compliance tracker and link it with geotagged employee data so that salaries and statutory obligations update automatically.”

Having said that, a more controversial aspect of the new implementation concerns the ease of layoffs. Earlier, companies with 100 employees needed prior government approval for layoffs or shutting operations, but that threshold has now been stretched to 300.

This has also led to various protests across regions in the country.

However, the code also states that workers with at least one year of continuous service continue to be entitled to 15 days’ average wages for every completed year of service as retrenchment compensation.

In addition, the Code now requires employers to contribute an amount equal to 15 days’ wages into a newly created re-skilling fund for each retrenched employee.

The post Decoding India’s New Labour Codes appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.