"What I built this weekend isn't production grade and is a toy version, but a useful starting point," Dogan continues. "I am surprised with the quality of what's generated in the end because I didn't prompt in depth about design choices yet CC was able to give me some good recommendations."
Dogan emphasizes that it takes years to learn and ground ideas in products, then come up with patterns that last for a long time. Once you have that insight and knowledge, building isn't that hard anymore. "It's totally trivial today to take your knowledge and build it again, which wasn't possible in the past," she writes. According to Dogan, because you can build from scratch, the final artifacts are free from baggage.
Original article, January 3, 2026:
A senior Google engineer says Anthropic's Claude Code generated a working system in one hour that her team has been developing since last year.
Jaana Dogan, Principal Engineer at Google responsible for the Gemini API, wrote on X that she gave Claude Code a problem description and got back a result in one hour that matches what her team has been building for the past year. The task involved distributed agent orchestrators: systems that coordinate multiple AI agents. According to Dogan, Google had explored various approaches to this problem without reaching consensus.
