Google has the same AI adoption curve as John Deere

Is there a name for the thing where "plausible" sounding, easily digestible narratives with nothing to back them up are used to explain complex interactions that noone really fully understands.

While google definitely has issues, this aint the root cause, even if there where only one root cause.

This is so doomy, like not being all in is the biggest mistake.

> 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.

> They may have moats and high walls, but the horde is coming for them all the same.

Can somebody explain how engineering getting a bit cheaper justifies this hysteria?

From the little I know, it seems that there is plenty more to running a software business than engineering, especially if you don’t include project management or product vision in that.

Maybe I’m an AI laggard or naive, but I see plenty of things that can’t easily be automated because I tried.

Maybe I’ll be automated away tomorrow by somebody who believes harder ...

This is a very smug post with very little substance.

> 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.

The 20% in the agentic power user camp broadly refuse to do any external educational communication. They're only interested in pulling the ladder up behind them; that is, if they are climbing the ladder at all, and its reasonable to have doubts about this for the reason that they broadly allow very little observability into their processes.

Anything from Steve Yegge must come with an AI bias disclaimer now.

I'm not sure what the expectations is supposed to be. Is Google supposed to have 100% adoption rate? Even OpenAI and Anthropic don't have that.

I have managers asking similar things at work: how can we increase AI adoption in dev teams? Why though? How does it benefit the manager? How can we increase the vim adoption rate for dev teams?

Google has thousands of mature products. You don't just throw a single solution (AI) to all problems.

What does it have to do with hiring freeze? They say 20% are agentic power users at Google. Can't they teach the others? Why would someone from outside be somehow more likely to use AI, or more likely to influence their colleagues?

Can someone explain to me how and in what way Claude Code is considered "agentic" and Cursor/Gemini CLI/Antigravity are not?

They basically wrote the equivalent to Claude Code and launched it as a product... how does their adoption curve lag behind John Deere?

> How is it that a handful of companies are taking off like a spaceship, and the rest, including Google, are mired in inaction?

Which companies? Not counting companies directly benefiting from selling AI.

> just cancelled IntelliJ for a thousand engineers

IntelliJ can't cost more than the AI provider subscriptions, and it will actually handle large refactors without breaking your codebase.

Yegge is basically posting straight up slop these days. He's making some extremely confident claims about google after talking to one person. Didn't stop to think if that person is the most informed on this.

Somehow yegge also has problems with the adoption curve being consistent with other companies. Whatever that means.

Why would we expect John Deere to have a low AI adoption curve? It's main product line is just as computerized as Tesla's.

It’s interesting that your code not being 100% AI slop will get your engineering org called “utterly mediocre” nowadays

20 years at Google and this is the shit he's relaying. Fire his ass.

> How is it that a handful of companies are taking off like a spaceship, and the rest, including Google, are mired in inaction?

All these companies are "taking off like a spaceship", so... where is all the (quality, non-slop) space traffic?

I use LLMs. I believe LLMs (especially combined with agentic coding) increase coding productivity and in the right hands can produce non-slop, but by and large on a macro level everything still feels pretty much the same industry wide as it did last year, and five years ago and ten years ago.