From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmani – The Pragmatic Engineer

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• Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.

• Google Cloud Run – run your code and host LLMs directly on top of Google’s scalable infrastructure, without having to worry about managing infra.

• Sentry – application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers

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Addy Osmani spent more than 14 years at Google, working on Chrome, DevTools, Core Web Vitals, and most recently, AI developer experience.

If you've ever opened Chrome DevTools, or optimized a page for Core Web Vitals, you’ve used software built by Addy Osmani. In this episode, I sit down with Addy and we talk about his path from building a web browser aged just 16 to becoming a director at Google. We discuss what he learned from building tools for millions of developers, Google’s engineering culture, and why he continued doing hands-on coding work as a manager. We also get into how he works with AI agents today, the risks of ‘cognitive surrender,’ his approach to ‘loop engineering,’ and why it’s good to develop skills in product management, go-to-market, and other areas.

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Timestamps

Intro

Addy’s current workflow

Addy’s path into tech

Addy’s work on jQuery

TodoMVC

Getting hired at Google and working on Chrome

Building dev tools

Core Web Vitals

Google’s engineering culture

Addy’s career trajectory at Google