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🚨 𝗕𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗞𝗜𝗡𝗚: Chelsea are now 9 points behind Arsenal in the title race! 😳

I had a great time speaking with Brian Roberts at Comcast headquarters in Philadelphia about the future of AI and Comcast's partnership with Sierra. I particularly loved learning more about Comcast's early bets on the Internet and the parallels to the adoption of AI.

2009: Moved to San Francisco. 2012-2014: I was living/working in SF part time (was still at Stripe much of this time) as my wife (then girlfriend) was finishing school and then working in NY and on assignment abroad. I was trying to keep our long distance relationship alive, and I’m glad I did. I bought a home here in 2013 because this is where we always wanted to build our lives. 2015-2019: Working for Bernie/AOC & founding Justice Dems, bouncing around campaign HQs and in Congress. Still came back home to SF often as this is where my community was. 2019-present: Living back in the city full-time. I’ve raised a school-aged daughter here. I feel really lucky to have had the opportunity to do the work I did, and to be able to keep my family together. But this is consistent with what I told you over the phone. If you add the years up, yes, it is over a decade of living in San Francisco.

It’s clear that AI will wind up funding universal income. Let’s make that happen ASAP.

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.

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.

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.