From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmani

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• Sentry – application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers

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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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Timestamps

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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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

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