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&#x27