AI is now besting some of the best engineers in the world at writing code — and that too by a wide margin.
Jaana Dogan, a Principal Engineer at Google who works on the Gemini API, has said that Claude Code managed to build in an hour what took their team a year to build. “I’m not joking and this isn’t funny. We have been trying to build distributed agent orchestrators at Google since last year. There are various options, not everyone is aligned… I gave Claude Code a description of the problem, it generated what we built last year in an hour,” she posted on X.
“It’s not perfect and I’m iterating on it but this is where we are right now. If you are skeptical of coding agents, try it on a domain you are already an expert of. Build something complex from scratch where you can be the judge of the artifacts,” she added.
“Building at large companies is hard right now due to the legacy infrastructure. 10-15 years ago, some of these companies were building in house to be frontier. Today, what’s available internally is too disconnected from what’s available outside and is often years behind,” she said.
Dogan acknowledged that she was using a competitor’s product while still at Google. “This industry has never been a zero-sum game, so it’s easy to give credit where it’s due even when it’s a competitor. Claude Code is impressive work, I’m excited and more motivated to push us all forward,” she said. Google interestingly is an investor in Anthropic, and Anthropic signed a major deal with Google to use its TPUs for its computing needs.
This anecdote is yet another datapoint of how coding — even at top companies — is being disrupted by AI. Just last week, Claude Code’s creator Boris Cherny had said that all his code in the past month had been written by Claude Code. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said that 90% of Anthropic’s code is now being written by AI, and Google had cited a 50% number a few months ago, and Microsoft had come up with a 30% number earlier this year. And with top Google engineers saying that a single AI program is doing more in an hour than an entire team had done in a year, it does seem that human-written code could very well be a thing of the past in the coming years.