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

Instacart is posing the provocative question: What if most of the work your engineers do today should, in fact, be done by machines?At VB Transform 2026, CTO Anirban Kundu argued that dev teams continue to waste their time on draining, repetitive, high-volume work; this should be absorbed by AI agents so that humans can focus on problems that require judgment, intent, and exception handling. In fact, in 97% of cases, Instacart’s builders don’t even read code anymore. “In the past, the tactical level was the creation of the code,” Kundu said. “In the most tactical level going forward, it's going to be, ‘How do you navigate around the AI system to give you what you want?’”AI generating code, performing "pretty serious evals" That doesn’t mean humans never look at code; agents handle the bulk