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

At VB Transform 2026, Instacart CTO Anirban Kundu said AI agents now generate much of the company’s code and handle repetitive engineering work.

The company says only a small slice of work still needs humans, mainly in legacy, compliance, and latency-sensitive systems.

Instacart is also rebuilding parts of its stack into more modular architectures to reduce tech debt and improve flexibility.

Its agentic SRE system, trained on internal incidents, and the Blueberry tool are helping detect and diagnose production issues faster than humans in some cases.