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Original: Simon Willison · 13/04/2026

Summary

Steve Yegge discusses Google’s AI adoption and internal culture, highlighting a divide among employees regarding technology use and a stagnant hiring environment.

Key Insights

“Google engineering appears to have the same AI adoption footprint as John Deere, the tractor company.” — Yegge’s observation on the similarity in AI adoption curves across industries.
“This post doesn’t match the state of agentic coding at our company.” — Addy Osmani’s response to Yegge’s claims about Google’s engineering practices.
“This post is completely false and just pure clickbait.” — Demis Hassabis criticizing Yegge’s article for its accuracy.

Topics


Full Article

13th April 2026 Steve Yegge: I was chatting with my buddy at Google, who’s been a tech director there for about 20 years, about their AI adoption. Craziest convo I’ve had all year. The TL;DR is that Google engineering appears to have the same AI adoption footprint as John Deere, the tractor company. Most of the industry has the same internal adoption curve: 20% agentic power users, 20% outright refusers, 60% still using Cursor or equivalent chat tool. It turns out Google has this curve too. […] There has been an industry-wide hiring freeze for 18+ months, during which time nobody has been moving jobs. So there are no clued-in people coming in from the outside to tell Google how far behind they are, how utterly mediocre they have become as an eng org. Addy Osmani: On behalf of @Google, this post doesn’t match the state of agentic coding at our company. Over 40K SWEs use agentic coding weekly here. Googlers have access to our own versions of @antigravity, @geminicli, custom models, skills, CLIs and MCPs for our daily work. Orchestrators, agent loops, virtual SWE teams and many other systems are actively available to folks. […] Demis Hassabis: Maybe tell your buddy to do some actual work and to stop spreading absolute nonsense. This post is completely false and just pure clickbait.

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