Key Points

Steve Yegge claims—based on a conversation with a long-tenured Google tech director—that Google’s AI adoption resembles the broader industry pattern: a small share of agentic power users, a similar share of refusers, and a majority using chat tools like Cursor.
The post also alleges that an 18+ month industry-wide hiring freeze has left Google without new external talent to challenge or correct internal shortcomings.
Addy Osmani disputes the characterization, stating that Google has extensive agentic coding usage (e.g., 40K+ weekly) and provides internal tools such as agentic CLIs, skills, custom models, orchestrators/agent loops, and MCPs.
Demis Hassabis further condemns the Yegge post as false and clickbait, arguing it spreads misinformation rather than reflecting reality.
Overall, the article highlights a public dispute over how far agentic AI has actually been adopted inside major tech organizations, underscoring differing perceptions and metrics.

Simon Willison’s Weblog

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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: