In a revelation that underscores the breathtaking acceleration of artificial intelligence, a senior Google engineer has shared a staggering personal experience where an AI coding tool accomplished in one hour what her team had been working on for an entire year.
The Mind-Boggling One-Hour Achievement
Jaana Dogan, a principal engineer at Google working on the Gemini API, recently took to social media platform X to detail her encounter with Anthropic's Claude Code, an AI-powered coding assistant. On January 2, 2026, Dogan described providing the AI with a problem description and receiving, within a mere hour, a result that closely mirrored the output of her Google team's year-long effort.
"I'm not joking and this isn't funny," Dogan wrote in her viral post. "We have been trying to build distributed agent orchestrators at Google since last year. There are various options, not everyone is aligned… I gave Claude Code a description of the problem, it generated what we built last year in an hour."
Details of the Experiment and AI's Rapid Evolution
Dogan clarified that the task involved creating distributed agent orchestrators—complex systems designed to coordinate multiple AI agents. Her Google team had explored numerous approaches without finalizing a design. For her test, she could not use internal Google data, so she crafted a simplified, three-paragraph prompt based on existing public ideas to evaluate Claude Code's capabilities.
While she noted the AI-generated result was not perfect and required refinement, the core achievement was undeniable. Dogan used this experience to chart the dizzying evolution of AI-assisted programming. In 2022, such systems could complete single lines of code. By 2023, they handled code sections. 2024 saw them work across multiple files to build simple apps. Now, in 2025, they can create and restructure entire codebases.
"Quality and efficiency gains in this domain are beyond what anyone could have imagined so far," Dogan admitted, reflecting that just a few years prior, she believed such capabilities were half a decade away.
Industry Implications and a Collaborative Spirit
The engineer's post, amassing millions of views, sparked widespread discussion about AI's potential to bypass organizational bureaucracy and supercharge individual developer creativity. Dogan addressed several follow-up questions, stating that while Google does not use Claude Code for internal proprietary work—it's permitted only for open-source projects—the development is not viewed as a pure loss.
When asked about Google's own Gemini reaching similar prowess, she responded, "We are working hard right now. The models and the harness." She emphasized that AI advancement is not a zero-sum game, praising competitors' strong work. "Claude Code is impressive work, I'm excited and more motivated to push us all forward," she concluded.
Dogan's key advice for skeptics was to personally test AI coding agents in domains where they possess deep expertise, allowing them to witness the transformative potential firsthand.
