(2026-04-20) Steve Yegge I Was Chatting With My Buddy At Google

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.*

But why is Google so... average? How is it that a handful of companies are taking off like a spaceship, and the rest, including Google, are mired in inaction?

My buddy's observation was key here: 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.

He says the problem is that they can't use Claude Code because it's the enemy, and Gemini has never been good enough to capture people's workflows like Claude has, so basically agentic coding just never really took off inside Google.

Not only is Google not able to do anything about it, they don't seem to be aware of the problem at all.

And then there are a few companies I've met recently who are amazingly leaned in to AI adoption. One category-leader company just cancelled IntelliJ for a thousand engineers. That's an incredibly bold move, one of many they're making towards agentic adoption. In my opinion, that company is setting themselves up for a huge W.

As for the rest, well, it's the Great Siloing. Everyone's flying blind.

Half of them just check a box: "We enabled {Copilot/Cursor} for everyone!" Cue smug celebrations. They think this is like getting SOC2 compliance, just a thing they turn on and now it's "solved." And they don't realize that they've done effectively nothing at all.

All because of a hiring freeze.

Apr20: "My tweet last week about Google's AI adoption drew a lot of pushback, to say the least. Since then, Googlers from multiple orgs have reached out to me independently and anonymously. They've expressed fear of being doxxed, concern about what they saw as bullying of me, and general corroboration of my original tweet*

What they describe is a two-tier system. DeepMind engineers use Claude as a daily tool. Most of the rest of Google does not. When the question of equalizing access came up internally, the proposed response was to remove Claude for everyone — which DeepMind objected to so strongly that several engineers reportedly threatened to leave.

Non-DeepMind engineers get pushed onto internal Gemini variants behind router-style names that obscure which underlying model is actually serving a request. Multiple engineers describe regressions and reliability problems severe enough that some senior people have stopped using the tools. A senior manager on a major product line reportedly flagged attrition concerns over exactly this issue.

Addy Osmani's reply on behalf of Google said over 40,000 SWEs use agentic coding weekly. I don't doubt the number. But weekly use of a thin tool is precisely the box-checking I described in the original post