Jaana Dogan, a principal engineer at Google who works on the Gemini API, recently shared a striking experience after experimenting with Anthropic’s AI coding assistant, Claude Code. According to Dogan, she was surprised to see that Claude Code produced a solution in just one hour that closely resembled what her Google team had been developing for nearly a year.
In a post on X, Dogan explained that the challenge involved building distributed agent orchestrators—systems designed to coordinate multiple AI agents working together. She noted that her team at Google had explored many possible approaches to this problem but had yet to settle on a final design.
“I’m not joking, and this isn’t funny,” Dogan wrote. “We’ve been trying to build distributed agent orchestrators at Google since last year. There are many possible directions, and not everyone agrees. I gave Claude Code a description of the problem, and in an hour, it generated something very similar to what we built last year.”
She clarified that the prompt she provided was not highly detailed—just three short paragraphs. Since she could not share any of Google’s internal information, Dogan created a simplified version of the problem using publicly known ideas to test how Claude Code would respond.
While the output wasn’t flawless and still required refinement, Dogan said the experience changed her perspective. She encouraged skeptics of AI coding tools to test them in areas where they already have strong domain expertise, rather than unfamiliar ones.
When asked whether Google engineers use Claude Code, Dogan said it is permitted only for open-source projects and not for internal development. Another user questioned when Google’s Gemini would reach a similar level of capability. In response, Dogan said, “We’re working hard right now—on both the models and the supporting infrastructure.”
She also stressed that progress in AI is not a zero-sum game. Acknowledging strong work from competitors, she said, is both reasonable and healthy for the field. “Claude Code is impressive,” Dogan wrote. “I’m excited—and even more motivated—to keep pushing all of us forward.”