I've been playing the LinkedIn daily games for a while now. I wanted a quick way to view my 'rankings' across the games in a quick glance. I made a stupid hacky bookmarklet. I click it in my bookmarks bar, and get a pretty table a few seconds later.
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. They're all just plodding along, completely oblivious to what's happening out there right now.
Not only is Google not able to do anything about it, they don't seem to be aware of the problem at all. I'm having major flashbacks to fifty years ago as a kid at the La Brea Tar Pits, asking, "why can't they just climb out?"
My Google friend and I had this conversation over a month ago. I didn't share it because I wanted to look around a bit, and see if it's really as bad as all that. I've been talking to people from dozens of companies since then. And yeah. It's as bad as all that.
Google is about average. Some companies at the bottom have near-zero AI adoption and can't even get budget for AI. They may have moats and high walls, but the horde is coming for them all the same.
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. With nobody moving companies, no company knows where they stand on the AI adoption curve. Nobody knows how they're doing compared to everyone else.
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.
OK, well. I ran /autoresearch on the the liquid codebase.
53% faster combined parse+render time, 61% fewer object allocations.
This is probably somewhat overfit, but there are absolutely amazing ideas in this.
It’s Next.js Liberation Day.
The #1 request we kept hearing: help us run Next fast and secure, without the lock-in and the costs.
So we did it. We kept the amazing DX of @nextjs, without the bespoke tooling, built on @vite. We’re working with other providers to make deployment a first-class experience everywhere.
Next.js belongs to everyone.
https://t.co/2A3pHnQLfp
The xteink x4 is, by far, the best rink device for reading on the go that I've found.
I've done a lot of research in this space to come to the conclusion. It's tiny, fast, and comfy. Any time I have a spare minute and want to read a page, I take it out of my pocket and read.
Qualifiers: it's only good for text-centric reading (no images or diagrams), and it's basically necessary to install custom firmware such as crosspoint.
@jreuben1@Miezhiko misc: when I joined Darklang, my interest was born of it being "cloud+dist F#" as a long-time F# fan :) It's grown since then, and I'm excited for the more modern applications (WIP).
FWIW you may appreciate this (slightly outdated) list: https://t.co/1Yq80k5aw6
Tailwind's lost 40% of their web traffic, a bunch of revenue, and yet has 300%+ growth in npm installs and usage at all time highs.
An incredibly raw, honest take from one of our industry's best on the realities of running a business in the midst of the creative destruction AI is bringing.
Worth a listen, the whole way through.
As everyone is going crazy about Ralph, I keep wondering, why it is even necessary. It seems reasonable to expect from an AI coding agents that it loops automatically until it has finished what it was asked to do.
while my friends played starcraft, i studied the compiler. and now you come to me ...
wait hold on your saying niche computer knowledge is commoditized now and what matters is coordinating a bunch of agents with lots of quick task switching and high APM
Likely the best slide deck I've ever made https://t.co/Ffw2XS980K - I miss giving in-person tech talks.
(this is from 2018 - I just stumbled upon the deck)