Instacart's CTO says AI made the company stop worrying about tech debt

Instacart CTO Anirban Kundu said at VB Transform 2026 that AI agents now handle most code generation and repetitive engineering work, with developers reportedly not reading code in 97% of cases. He said this lets teams worry less about tech debt, while humans focus on legacy systems, compliance, latency-sensitive workflows, and exception handling.

The shift suggests software engineering is moving from manual coding toward intent-driven orchestration, where developers guide and evaluate AI systems instead of writing every line. If this model scales, companies may rebuild software more continuously, but strong evaluation, governance, and human oversight will become more critical.