Today, Shanghai is so cold that I can only stay at home and watch dramas and browse Twitter.
I stumbled upon a message that startled me. My first reaction was that I had misread it.
Google's chief engineer revealed: the project her team had been bickering over for a year without completion, she used Claude Code to finish in 1 hour.
Huh? You didn't read it wrong. 
A big shot from Google is actually using a competitor's product, Claude, and in doing so, gave her own team a resounding slap in the face.
The developer circle in Silicon Valley instantly erupted.
This whole thing is so surreal that even I didn't dare to believe it at first.
01: A Year of Bickering vs. Getting It Done in 1 Hour
The cause of the matter is quite simple.
Jaana wanted to get something called a "distributed agent orchestrator" done.
We won't delve into the specific technical details. You just need to know that this thing is an extremely complex systems engineering project.
Following the惯例 (common practice) of big factories like Google (and domestic big factories too, you know the deal)—
- First, hold a kick-off meeting;
- Then write hundreds of pages of PPTs to align on the details;
- Team A says use this solution, Team B says that solution is better;
- Endless debates, compromises, and process approvals...
The result: a year passed, and the project was still "trying to be built."
This kind of "big company disease," I'm sure everyone watching has deeply experienced it, right?
But this time, it seems Jaana is a woman with a short temper; she just couldn't stand it anymore.
On an impulse, she threw the requirements directly to Anthropic's Claude Code.
Surprisingly, yet reasonably—
In just one hour, Claude Code directly gave her a runnable prototype system.
Although it wasn't 100% perfect, this was something her team had been dawdling over for a year and couldn't produce!
This story sounds almost magical.
After all, Google is no small workshop, and those engineers are no slouches. Could a single Claude Code really outperform an elite team?
Facing such doubts, this short-tempered lady directly retorted:
"Don't just talk rubbish, go try it yourself. Find a field you're best at, have it write a complex project from scratch, then you'll know what I'm talking about."
In addition to skepticism, of course, there were many more people being sarcastic: doesn't Google have a pile of its own beloved tools like Gemini CLI and Antigravity?
Why didn't she use them?
Facing such cynical remarks, her answer was very magnanimous:
You see, this is the magnanimity of a top technical professional.
And just as commentator YuChen Jin said: providing engineers with the best AI programming tools is one of the best decisions you can make.
Allowing employees to use competitors' products is even more magnanimous on the part of a top company.
02: Even the Experts Are Worried: Your Worldview Might Be "Obsolete"
Seeing this, some might say: "Hmph, it must be because the code was too simple, or this person hasn't seen much of the world, right?"
Such conclusions often appear in my comment section. Every time I post about similar programming models (or Agents), a group of people jumps out to bash them as "toys" or "gimmicks."
But, Jaana Dogan is not some fresh graduate or intern.
She is a Principal Engineer at Google, a legendary figure in the Go language community, and a top technical expert ranked in the top 1% globally.
Even an expert of this level feels that the code written by current programming agents (especially Claude Code) is not only "usable" but has also reached an "expert-level aesthetic" in terms of architecture and logic.
Does this mean the singularity is truly here?
In fact, this kind of "cognitive earthquake" is sweeping through the top circles of Silicon Valley.
In the past few days, not just Jaana, but even Igor Babuschkin, a core member of competitor Musk's xAI, had to admit: "Opus 4.5 is pretty good."
AI circle "top god" Andrej Karpathy also directly added to it:
This is reality.
Last night, Boris Cherny, the founder of Claude Code, casually posted a simple usage tutorial, and it instantly drew over 2 million people to watch and learn.
On one side, the big names are all shouting "the world is changing," and on the other side, millions of people are studying late into the night to catch up.
It looks like the world is really about to change?
03: Final Thoughts: Stop Arguing and Just Use It
After reading this story, my biggest feeling isn't about how embarrassed Google is, but rather the straightforward truth a netizen pointed out:
"Anyone who thinks AI is a bubble definitely hasn't used Claude Opus 4.5."
Now, there's a huge group of people online who are busy doubting everything: seeing an AI demo writing a front-end, they argue "can it write the back-end logic?"
Seeing an AI generate an image, they bash it saying "that's just stitching things together, not design."
But the question is, after all this doubting, they probably haven't even tried it themselves once.
This story also brings out a more essential truth: a tool is just a tool.
Whether it's from Google or Anthropic, whether it's a domestic champion or an overseas large model, as long as it can solve the problem and improve efficiency, it's a good thing.
It's 2026. Put aside your prejudice and put down your arrogance.
In this era, there are only two types of people: the "doers" who use AI (even from a competitor) to get things done, and the "commentators" who stand on the shore still arguing about whether the water is cold or not.
Which type do you want to be? Try it yourself; it's always better than just talking.
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