Google’s Tech Chief Jaana Dogan Surprised as Rival AI Recreates Team’s Year Long Work in an Hour

San Francisco, Jan 7: Jaana Dogan, a Principal Engineer at Google working on the Gemini API, has drawn attention in the tech community after sharing an experience involving Anthropic’s Claude Code, an AI tool developed by a competitor.

Dogan described giving Claude Code only a high-level problem description, without any internal documents or proprietary code. What the AI produced, she said, closely resembled work her team had developed over the past year, completing in an hour what had previously taken months of discussion, refinement, and iteration.

“I’m not joking and this isn’t funny,” Dogan wrote on X. “I gave Claude Code a description of the problem, it generated what we built last year in an hour.”

While the AI output was not a finished system, it produced a prototype reflecting architectural ideas her team had painstakingly developed. Dogan emphasized that the similarity was striking, even if the result was more a draft than a complete solution.

Engineering community reaction

The revelation resonated widely within the engineering and AI community. Dogan encouraged engineers to test AI tools on problems they know well, arguing this is the best way to evaluate current AI capabilities. Observers noted that the incident does not diminish the value of human development work, but underscores how AI tools can compress months of design and prototyping into hours when given clear, domain-specific inputs.

Dogan clarified that human engineering remains essential, and her post was intended to illustrate the speed and efficiency AI can provide in generating drafts or architectural prototypes, not to suggest that human effort is obsolete.

The episode highlights the rapid advancement of AI systems and the potential for competitor tools to replicate complex engineering ideas, sparking discussions on productivity, collaboration, and the evolving role of AI in software development.