Simon Willison’s Weblog

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.