Steve Yegge

Simon Willison's Blog News

Summary

Steve Yegge claims Google's AI adoption lags behind industry standards with most engineers still using basic chat tools, but Google executives Addy Osmani and Demis Hassabis publicly disputed the claims, stating over 40K engineers use agentic coding tools weekly.

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Cached at: 04/20/26, 08:27 AM

# Steve Yegge Source: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/13/steve-yegge/ 13th April 2026 Steve Yegge (https://twitter.com/steve_yegge/status/2043747998740689171): > 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 (https://twitter.com/addyosmani/status/2043812343508021460): > 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 (https://twitter.com/demishassabis/status/2043867486320222333): > 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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