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.

Update 20th April 2026: Steve doubled down:

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. [...]