What Engineers Actually Do Now That AI Writes the Code
About this episode
The CTO of Freshworks says more than 70% of the company's new code is now written by AI — and he runs the engineering org that ships it. Murali Swaminathan has built through four technology waves (pre-internet, client-server, SaaS, and now AI), and in this conversation he explains what it actually takes to rebuild a 15-year-old public company for the agentic era — while the plane is still flying. What broke, what he refuses to automate, and why he tells everyone to "assume this is the worst AI you'll ever use."
Key moments
- 00:00 More than half their code is now written by AI
- 01:13 Meet the CTO rebuilding a 15-year-old company for AI
- 01:50 What four tech waves taught him about AI adoption
- 03:58 Why Freshworks changed its homepage three times in four months
- 04:56 Did the product actually change, or just the marketing?
- 08:07 What they rebuilt from scratch vs. layered AI on top
- 15:56 When old-school machine learning still beats an LLM
- 21:00 The hardest problem: getting AI from 40% to 70% accuracy
- 22:18 How do you stop an AI agent from going rogue?
- 24:59 How do you price AI agents when they replace seats?
- 30:21 Is it really true half your code is written by AI?
- 33:46 Does doing more with AI get you promoted, or is it the new baseline?
- 36:55 How AI changes how big your team needs to be
- 44:35 What he told his son about a career AI can't replace
- 50:11 Are we in an AI bubble?
- 51:31 Will AI agents outnumber employees?
- 56:08 The one book on working with AI