Descriptions:
Addy Osmani spent more than 14 years at Google, working on Chrome, DevTools, Core Web Vitals, and most recently, AI developer experience.
If you’ve ever opened Chrome DevTools, or optimized a page for Core Web Vitals, you’ve used software built by Addy Osmani. In this episode, I sit down with Addy and we talk about his path from building a web browser aged just 16 to becoming a director at Google. We discuss what he learned from building tools for millions of developers, Google’s engineering culture, and why he continued doing hands-on coding work as a manager. We also get into how he works with AI agents today, the risks of ‘cognitive surrender,’ his approach to ‘loop engineering,’ and why it’s good to develop skills in product management, go-to-market, and other areas.
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*Brought to you by:*
• Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages https://antithesis.com/pragmatic
• Sentry – application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers https://sentry.io/pragmatic
• Google Cloud Run – run your code and host LLMs directly on top of Google’s scalable infrastructure, without having to worry about managing infra. https://cloud.google.com/run?e=48754805&utm_source=&utm_medium=&utm_campaign=the_pragmatic_engineer
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*The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:*
• What is loop engineering? https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/what-is-loop-engineering
• Inside Google’s engineering culture https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/google
• How AI-assisted coding will change software engineering: hard truths https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-ai-will-change-software-engineering
• Are AI agents actually slowing us down? https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/are-ai-agents-actually-slowing-us
• How Claude Code is built https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-claude-code-is-built
• How Codex is built https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-codex-is-built
• From IDEs to AI Agents with Steve Yegge https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/from-ides-to-ai-agents-with-steve?
• Google’s engineering culture: the podcast https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/googles-engineering-culture?utm_source=chatgpt.com
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*Where to find Addy Osmani:*
• X: https://x.com/addyosmani
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/addyosmani
• Website: https://addyosmani.com
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*In this episode, we cover:*
00:00 Intro
02:50 Addy’s current workflow
05:11 Addy’s path into tech
15:04 Addy’s work on jQuery
16:44 TodoMVC
21:44 Getting hired at Google and working on Chrome
27:17 Building dev tools
40:15 Core Web Vitals
45:42 Google’s engineering culture
51:03 Addy’s career trajectory at Google
57:55 The director role at Google
1:01:40 Cognitive debt and cognitive surrender
1:03:03 Working with agents
1:05:52 Loop engineering
1:12:55 The changing role of the software engineer
1:18:15 How Addy uses AI in writing
1:27:40 What’s next for Addy
1:28:47 Career advice
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See the transcript and other references from the episode at https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/podcast
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Production and marketing by https://penname.co/.
