Addy Osmani is an engineering and evangelism leader who spent over 14 years at Google leading developer experience across Chrome and, in recent years, AI (Gemini, coding agents, and agentic engineering), most recently as a Director at Google Cloud AI. https://addyosmani.com AI gets good at anything with an answer key. Your career is everything that doesn't have one. Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/career-advice-age-of-agents/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/career-advice-age-of-agents/ The action in agentic engineering has moved from prompting to operating. Autonomy isn't one ladder, it's two axes (agency and orchestration) and six levels you move between per task. The real question is what level a task deserves, and what verification makes that level defensible. Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/agentic-autonomy-levels/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/agentic-autonomy-levels/ I co-wrote a Google whitepaper about how AI is changing the software lifecycle. I'm not going to summarize the whole thing. Instead, here are the handful of ideas in it I think actually matter, plus six figures you're welcome to reuse. Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/new-sdlc-vibe-coding/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/new-sdlc-vibe-coding/ Coding agents are extraordinarily good now, and getting better fast. The interesting consequence is that the hard part of engineering moved from writing code to deciding whether to trust it, which makes review the most leveraged skill in software right now. How you approach it depends enormously on who you are: a solo developer with no users and a team maintaining a ten-year-old application are not solving the same problem. Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/agentic-code-review/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/agentic-code-review/ You don't really need to be good at prompting anymore. The thing to get good at is the loop that does the prompting for you. It's five building blocks plus somewhere to keep notes, and Codex and Claude Code both have all five now. Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/loop-engineering/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/loop-engineering/ Technical debt lives in your code. Cognitive debt lives in your head. Intent debt lives in the artifacts you may have never wrote: the goals, constraints, and rationale for why the system is the way it is. If you're lucky, some of this exists scattered in team documents or discussions, but it's likely incomplete. It's the one kind of debt your agents can't pay down for you, and agentic engineering makes it the most expensive. Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/intent-debt/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/intent-debt/ Starting more agents is easy now. However, more agents running doesn't mean more of you available - your cognitive bandwidth doesn't parallelize. All the judgement to actually steer them and merge the code they write into the codebase still has to route through exactly one serial processor which is just you. Orchestration tax is basically the price you pay for forgetting this and the only real fix is to start architecting your own attention like you architect any concurrent system. Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/orchestration-tax/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/orchestration-tax/ Right now, it's too easy to let AI write the code while you skip the learning. The bug gets fixed. Your mental model doesn't move. We are silently trading future capability for present-day speed, and the tools won't force us to do otherwise. That part has to come from you. Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/dont-outsource-learning/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/dont-outsource-learning/ Cognitive offloading is delegating to the AI and still owning the answer. Cognitive surrender is when the AI's output quietly becomes your output and there is nothing left to check. For software engineers the line between the two moves under your feet most days, and most of us are crossing it without noticing. Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/cognitive-surrender/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/cognitive-surrender/ AI coding agents take the shortest path to done, which usually means skipping the specs, tests, and reviews that make software reliable at scale. Agent Skills encodes those senior-engineer behaviors as workflows the agent has to follow, with anti-rationalization built in. Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/agent-skills/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/agent-skills/