A Conversation with Google Cloud AI Director Addy Osmani

What this episode covers

Addy Osmani should be a familiar face to the O’Reilly community. He’s the cohost of our AI Codecon events, the author of Beyond Vibe Coding, Leading Effective Engineering Teams, The Effective Software Engineer, Web Performance Engineering in the Age of AI, Learning JavaScript Design Patterns, and Building Web Apps with Bolt, and a prolific blogger on Radar and with his own newsletter, Elevate. He’s also a longtime Googler who’s spent nearly 14 years building developer experiences in Chrome and is now helping developers and businesses succeed with Gemini. As Tim O’Reilly put it in the introduction to this episode, “Addy Osmani is one of those people who is really grounded but also really able to think big and see the future.”Addy sat down with Tim to chat about the state of the industry as it moves toward the orchestration of multi-agent workloads. In their wide-ranging conversation, they covered the tension between creativity and productivity, and balancing velocity with long-term technical maintenance and reliability—particularly from the enterprise perspective. Larger organizations can’t just let the agents rip. As Addy explained, “The real frontier for business is not necessarily having hundreds of agents for a task just for its own sake. It’s about orchestrating a modest set of agents that solve real problems while maintaining control and traceability.” And then there’s the as-of-yet unsolved problem of making everything work together as smoothly as possible.Along the way, they considered the distinction between “feeling” productive and “being” productive (h/t Will Manidis); how to keep up-to-date on the latest trends and conversations; why being able to explicitly define the architecture and the purpose of what you’re building will matter more than how fast an AI tool can build it; why it’s still a good moment for young students to become software engineers; how MCP and A2A complement each other; why YOLOing token use is probably not the best strategy for most people; and more.Watch now, or read Tim’s takeaways from the conversation (with clips) on Radar.

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