From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmani

**Gergely Orosz** (0:00)
If you've ever opened Chrome DevTools or optimized a page for Core Web Vitals, you've used software built by Addy Osmani. Addy spent 14 years at Google, most of it on Chrome, going from software engineer to director of engineering. And when starting out in tech, as a teenager in rural Ireland, he built his own web browser from the ground up. Today we talk about the inside story of Chrome DevTools, why it became the closest thing Google has to an IDE, and the problems that are still unsolved like memory debugging. What becomes different when you become a director at Google, and how Addy stayed hands-on building software while building an engine of work with more than 50 people. How AI is changing software engineering, cognitive depth, cognitive surrender, loop engineering, and software factories, and many more. If you want to hear from someone who has spent decades helping developers understand the web, and is now thinking deeply about how AI changes software engineering, this episode is for you. This episode is presented by Antisysys.
If you work with agents, your job is no longer just writing code, it's specifying and testing it. And Antisysys is the most effective method of verifying agentic code today.
Before we get into Addy's journey at Google, I wanted to talk about a really cool product at Google, Google Cloud Run and their recently launched Cloud Run Sandboxes. When you're building AI applications or AI agents, you often want to run untrusted programs like execute some Python code the model generated, or run a headless browser to fetch data from the web, or even execute code submitted by a user. But how do you make this fast and secure? This is exactly what Cloud Run Sandboxes do. Cloud Run Sandboxes are ephemeral, isolated gVisor environments that spin up extremely fast. They were built with security in mind. They enforce credential and environment isolation. Basically, they have no access to your services environment variables or secrets. Sandboxes also operate with logged-down network egress, denied by default, to the Internet. Accelerate development, eliminate infrastructure toil, and run untrusted workloads with confidence on Google Cloud Run. Try Cloud Run Sandboxes today at cloud.run.
Addy, it's so nice to have you in person on the podcast.

**Addy Osmani** (1:59)
Oh, thank you for having me.

**Gergely Orosz** (2:01)
And before we kick off into your career and how you got started, I wanted to ask just before we started recording, we're talking about how has your day-to-day workflow changed recently, a bunch thanks to all these tools.

**Addy Osmani** (2:15)
So agents have allowed me to take the improbable and turn it into the possible. In ways that are kind of weird and wonderful every day, I manage a lot of my life now using agents. And one example just from this week, we've got the AI World Fair happening in San Francisco. I'm doing a closing keynote a couple of days in. And so I wanted to make sure I wasn't repeating any beats that other speakers had gone into depth on.
And I also wanted to make sure there was good connective tissue from my talk to a lot of the other sessions that had happened. Now, normally in the old days, you kind of pray and hope that there was any content from these sessions online. And maybe you'd look through the abstracts. I was able to fire off a bunch of agents, go through everything that you can find about the talks from the last couple of days, look at the abstracts, any social content, anything around that that can be useful.
And that was able to help me kind of sculpt what I already wanted to talk about into something that I hope is refined and will give people a way to connect from other parts of this conference back to the way that I'm going to close it up. That for me just feels very empowering, something that would have taken a very long time, if I would have even been able to do it at all, is now very much within reach.

**Gergely Orosz** (3:34)
And then you mentioned that it feels like, and a lot of people tell you, like there's the kind of like both fun and chaos at the same time right now, like everywhere, right?

**Addy Osmani** (3:42)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Fun and chaos, I think that for many of us, when you have a lot of ideas or a lot of vision, you're often bounded by time or how much can I actually do? And in some ways, agents have unchained us.
And this is one of those reasons why you keep hearing, oh, hey, what are you doing with all of that time? Agents have freed up. Well, I'm doing more work. I think for many of us, if we didn't enjoy it, we wouldn't be filling that time up with work, but we're having fun with it. And so it's fun thriving in that chaos.