From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmani

Brought to You By:• Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.• Google Cloud Run – run your code and host LLMs directly on top of Google’s scalable infrastructure, without having to worry about managing infra.• Sentry – application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers—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.—Timestamps00:00 Intro02:50 Addy’s current workflow05:11 Addy’s path into tech15:04 Addy’s work on jQuery16:44 TodoMVC21:44 Getting hired at Google and working on Chrome27:17 Building dev tools40:15 Core Web Vitals45:42 Google’s engineering culture51:03 Addy’s career trajectory at Google57:55 The director role at Google1:01:40 Cognitive debt and cognitive surrender1:03:03 Working with agents1:05:52 Loop engineering1:12:55 The changing role of the software engineer1:18:15 How Addy uses AI in writing1:27:40 What’s next for Addy1:28:47 Career advice—The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:• What is loop engineering?• Inside Google’s engineering culture• How AI-assisted coding will change software engineering: hard truths• Are AI agents actually slowing us down?• How Claude Code is built• How Codex is built• From IDEs to AI Agents with Steve Yegge• Google’s engineering culture: the podcast—Production and marketing by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://penname.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com. Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe