{"id":415983,"date":"2026-04-29T03:51:19","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T03:51:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/415983\/"},"modified":"2026-04-29T03:51:19","modified_gmt":"2026-04-29T03:51:19","slug":"developer-loyalty-is-at-zero-right-now-google-doesnt-care-which-ai-coding-tool-you-use","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/415983\/","title":{"rendered":"“Developer loyalty is at zero right now”: Google doesn’t care which AI coding tool you use"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cDeveloper loyalty is at zero right now,\u201d Richard Seroter<\/a>, Google Cloud\u2019s Senior Director and Chief Evangelist, told The New Stack in a frank interview at the Google Cloud Next conference last week. For a company that offers many developer tools \u2014 and maybe too many \u2014 that\u2019s a tough position to be in. But Seroter isn\u2019t worried about it.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur job is that we should make it easy. If you want to build with AI or if you build AI apps, we should be excellent at both and be the best at both. We are not ceding anything. We will be the best at AI dev tools. We\u2019re gonna get there \u2014 always. I mean, that\u2019s everybody\u2019s goal. We\u2019re gonna keep pushing there,\u201d Seroter said.<\/p>\n

\u201cDeveloper loyalty is at zero right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Google is also pragmatic there. Even if a developer isn\u2019t using Google\u2019s developer tools, it still wants to be the platform where the code runs. <\/p>\n

That also extends to the experience of using models \u2014 and anyone\u2019s models \u2014 on Google Cloud, he argues. \u201cIf you look at the latency, the best performing way to use Anthropic is on Vertex over Azure, AWS, and Anthropic itself. And so even if you\u2019re using Claude Code, you should be using Vertex \u2014 otherwise you\u2019re just getting worse performance.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201c[Google Cloud CEO] Thomas Kurian told me a while back, when we started building our agent skills, we should have the best dev experience for anyone who\u2019s deploying to Google Cloud. I don\u2019t care what tool you use. Cursor? Unbelievable.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you pull in our skills, or you pull in our MCPs or instructions, that should be better than what Amazon offers you,\u201d Seroter said. \u201cAnd so you get the best advice, you get the most accurate advice. You get the right architecture that\u2019s correct the first time. So if you choose a different upstream toolchain, this should be your default. It\u2019s always gonna be better.\u201d<\/p>\n

Google Cloud is a platform, not a holding company<\/p>\n

He was clear that Google wants to win in all of these areas, but he also acknowledged that it\u2019s hard to be best-of-breed at everything. Taking a bit of a swipe at the competition, Seroter noted a philosophical difference in how Google Cloud approaches its platform. <\/p>\n

\u201cNot everyone agrees with me, but I don\u2019t think we are a portfolio company with 300 products. We\u2019re a platform company with one platform.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think Google sells 300 services. I think we sell one platform,\u201d he said. \u201cNot everyone agrees with me, but I don\u2019t think we are a portfolio company with 300 products. We\u2019re a platform company with one platform. [\u2026] I don\u2019t want a holding company in a cloud \u2014 and I think you still have those experiences in some clouds.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sometimes, he believes, it\u2019s okay for some services to be \u201cgood enough,\u201d but in some areas, Google Cloud wants to be better.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re going to pour ourselves into certain types of services that have to be excellent,\u201d he said. \u201cSo yeah, we can do more because we\u2019re a bigger team, but I think we all are selectively ruthless where we need to be more focused. And that\u2019s probably been the biggest change company-wise in the last three years \u2014 is that we\u2019ve just decided to be laser focused in a few areas, especially around AI development and excellence that I love \u2014 and that comes from the top.\u201d<\/p>\n

Is Google not moving fast enough?<\/p>\n

Google has been criticized a bit lately, especially by former Google engineer Steve Yegge<\/a>, who argues that Google isn\u2019t moving fast enough, in part because its own use of AI in engineering isn\u2019t up to par and because engineers are not able to \u2014 or don\u2019t want to \u2014 use the best available tools. <\/p>\n

In a recent post, Yegge specifically mentioned that his sources told him many of Google\u2019s engineers aren\u2019t allowed to use Claude Code \u201cbecause it\u2019s the enemy,\u201d even as the DeepMind team uses it<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Seroter, unsurprisingly, doesn\u2019t agree and argues that Google, given its outsized importance in the ecosystem, has to strike a balance between moving fast and keeping things stable.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re usually working with incomplete information. I know all the parties involved,\u201d he said of the recent criticism. \u201cSteve\u2019s work? I reviewed his Vibe Coding<\/a> [book] as a tech reviewer. [Co-author] Gene Kim sent me a copy. But you\u2019re working with incomplete information. Google is a big company.<\/p>\n

\u201cTalk to his buddy, the engineering manager here, who says this isn\u2019t working, but it\u2019s different than here and here. So, formally, are we doing it all the same way? Of course not. Android operates differently from Cloud and DeepMind, but at the same time, the push is to ensure we never sacrifice quality. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re gonna do it fast, but we\u2019re gonna do it safely.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo as much as it would be cool to vibe code the next extension to [Google] Maps, I can\u2019t break Maps. We don\u2019t have the luxury of shipping a chatbot. We have the luxury of running the most important platform and infrastructure on the planet. So we\u2019re gonna do it fast, but we\u2019re gonna do it safely. I don\u2019t think everyone has that obligation, and so there\u2019s a certain freedom to be a little more YOLO in some companies than ours. Doesn\u2019t mean we\u2019re still not going to be aggressive and fast \u2014 but I can\u2019t break the internet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Seroter also believes that Google is moving \u201cpretty darn fast\u201d and pointed at the new TPU hardware, agent platform, and model updates. \u201cIt is an amazing portfolio. How much faster do I need to go? I don\u2019t know, but our customers can not keep up with any of this stuff. No one does. How much faster do I need to be? Is speed the entire thing? Or is that still a way to ship quality products to customers? I think sometimes we lose sight of that, industry-wise, and it\u2019s purely about the speed. Speed to what, like speed, without direction is worthless.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\tYOUTUBE.COM\/THENEWSTACK\n\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\tTech moves fast, don’t miss an episode. Subscribe to our YouTube
\n\t\t\t\tchannel to stream all our podcasts, interviews, demos, and more.\n\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\tSUBSCRIBE<\/p>\n

\t<\/a><\/p>\n

Group
\n Created with Sketch.<\/p>\n

\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tBefore joining The New Stack as its senior editor for AI, Frederic was the enterprise editor at TechCrunch, where he covered everything from the rise of the cloud and the earliest days of Kubernetes to the advent of quantum computing….\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\tRead more from Frederic Lardinois\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cDeveloper loyalty is at zero right now,\u201d Richard Seroter, Google Cloud\u2019s Senior Director and Chief Evangelist, told The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":415984,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,85,46,125],"class_list":["post-415983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=415983"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415983\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/415984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=415983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=415983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=415983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}