Key Points

Steve Yegge (via Simon Willison’s quotation) argues that Google’s AI adoption among engineers mirrors a broader industry pattern, with roughly 20% advanced “agentic” power users, 20% refusing, and 60% relying on mainstream chat tools like Cursor.
The quote claims Google’s engineering org may be stagnating, citing an 18+ month hiring freeze that allegedly prevented new outside talent from correcting perceived shortcomings.
The post frames AI tool adoption not as a uniformly accelerating trend but as an uneven distribution of enthusiasm and resistance across teams.
Overall, the quotation is presented as an industry signal about how AI practices are being adopted organizationally rather than only what models are available.

Simon Willison’s Weblog

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13th April 2026

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.

— Steve Yegge

Posted 13th April 2026 at 8:59 pm