The productivity gains from artificial intelligence (AI) coding agents such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex are becoming more real and tangible, with complex coding cycles shrinking to just 2–3 days from nearly three months earlier, said Sridhar Vembu, founder and chief scientist at Zoho Corp.
From Months to Days
“Claude Code is the hottest platform compared to last year. I have personally seen it during the last month,” Vembu said during his keynote address at the Zoho Day 2026 event.
Sharing a real-world example, he said Zoho engineers provided a specification for a small domain-specific language (DSL) of about 200 lines of markdown along with a 100-line example and asked Claude Code to build a compiler. After 2–3 days of prompting, the team had a working prototype.
“This capability simply wasn’t there a year ago. I would not have believed it then,” Vembu said, adding that productivity improvements are real and not hype. “I want to report that the productivity gains are real and it is happening,” Vembu added.
He also highlighted the deployment of code-generating agentic tools in another team working on the Zoho Backstage product. “The interesting thing is the people who did this said they would earlier have used more junior programmers to assist them, but they were able to do it themselves,” he said.
However, Vembu cautioned that agentic systems cannot be left to operate on their own. “You don’t just chat with it and generate code. That’s not how it works,” he said. Vembu explained that human engineers must provide requirements to agentic AIs and then vet outputs according to their needs, a process known as agentic tool calling. Such human fine-tuning helps agents learn and improve over time through a feedback loop.
Human-in-the-Loop
Vembu also noted that this is a time of “maximum uncertainty,” as the real impact of AI on the software and SaaS industries remains unclear. “All of these productivity gains and any new technology that came around ended up creating more jobs. It transformed but the jobs did not go away,” he said. On the contrary, it may create more jobs Vembu said adding that when software becomes very cheap, more of it gets consumed, allowing businesses with unsolved problems to adopt it as costs fall.
At the same time, he warned against complacency. “I normally wouldn’t take it seriously, but there is one reason to take it seriously. What we are seeing in AI is the kind of intelligence that is capable of improving itself,” he said. Vembu said human-centric roles such as school teachers, nurses and customer care professionals could dominate as people begin to place greater value on human-to-human interaction. “I think that is where it might be heading,” he said.
Zoho, which completed 30 years last week, has crossed a milestone of one million paying customers worldwide and more than 150 million users across its multiple verticals, including Zoho, ManageEngine, Qntrl and TrainerCentral.