korrents

Addy Osmani

@addy-osmani · 22 positions · 0 changes of mind

Engineering leader and author who spent 14 years at Google, most of it on Chrome and Chrome DevTools, rising from software engineer to director of engineering, and who created TodoMVC and helped push Core Web Vitals.

Addy Osmani did not write this page.

We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.

  1. Our reading

    Computing is an onion, and the more layers of it you can peel back and understand, the better you can build for the constrained machines real people are using.

    Their wordsif you treat computing as this onion where you just keep peeling back the layers, there's always something interesting behind the scenes. And the more of those layers that you can peel back and understand, I think in some ways the better you can optimize for that world.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:14:00 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmaniyoutube.com 1st of 22 in this recording

    Interesting

  3. Our reading

    Very few developers understand memory management, and that is why the state of the art in memory debugging has barely moved in years.

    Their wordsI would say, sometimes, I don't know if it's controversial, that very few developers understand memory management. And that makes it even harder to debug memory problems. And so the state of the art around memory debugging hasn't evolved all that much over the years.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:29:39 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmaniyoutube.com 2nd of 22 in this recording

    Interesting

  5. Our reading

    Performance work used to mean half a day reading traces before writing a single fix, and language models have collapsed that step to minutes.

    Their wordsI remember anytime I would work with a big site on their performance problems, uh you could easily spend half a day, um you know, just looking at traces before you've even written any fixes at all. And now that we have LLMs, it's very quick to like reason through massive stack traces and actually be able to get down to fixes you can make.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:37:10 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmaniyoutube.com 3rd of 22 in this recording

    LLMs

    Interesting

  7. Our reading

    "Is the page loaded?" was never a real question, and web performance only became measurable once it was broken into the distinct moments a user actually notices.

    Their wordsI think for a very long time we had this this almost nebulous way of thinking about page load times. And the team felt like it was finally time to come up with a more nuanced perspective around how we reason about performance.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:41:46 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmaniyoutube.com 4th of 22 in this recording

    Interesting

  9. Our reading

    People treat an unresponsive interface exactly the way they treat a slow pedestrian crossing: they keep hitting the button.

    Their wordsHumans are humans are are shockingly simple, you know, uh, if you think about the experience you have with somebody that's just trying to cross the street, if, uh, you know, if the light doesn't turn, you know, doesn't say they can walk fast enough, they'll just keep hitting that button. That's the same experience they have on the internet.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:43:29 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmaniyoutube.com 5th of 22 in this recording

    Interesting

  11. Our reading

    A site's need to monetise is not a defence of an experience that shifts the page under the reader; those are separate questions.

    Their wordseven if you set aside, you know, maybe there's some validity around a business needs to monetize, those things shouldn't cause a really bad experience.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:44:05 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmaniyoutube.com 6th of 22 in this recording

    Interesting

  13. Our reading

    A platform cannot tell developers what technology to use; its only job is to help them succeed with whatever they have already chosen.

    Their wordsAnd that embrace of people are going to use whatever tech they want to use. You can't tell people what to use very often. They're going to use whatever they want, and your job is to help them be successful on your platform, and to help your users have a great time.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:48:19 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmaniyoutube.com 7th of 22 in this recording

    Interesting

  15. Our reading

    The point of building a self-sufficient organisation is not to step back from it, but to free yourself to work on the problem the organisation has not reached yet.

    Their wordsyou want to get to a point where you know, your your machine, your org is self-sufficient enough that you know, you just need to occasionally tap the blimp, make sure that things are working. You can course correct if it's not, but that frees you up to then focus on the next important sets of problems that the org needs to, you know, tackle heads on.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:53:45 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmaniyoutube.com 8th of 22 in this recording

    Interesting

  17. Our reading

    AI tooling has done something no earlier technology managed: pulled directors, VPs and SVPs back into building things with their own hands at the weekend.

    Their wordsOne of the things I found most exciting in the last couple of years was seeing as model qualities gotten better and and harnesses and tools have gotten better, how many people um that were directors or VPs or SVPs or any of these levels were actually rolling up their sleeves and trying things out.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 1:00:42 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmaniyoutube.com 9th of 22 in this recording

    Interesting

  19. Our reading

    Heavy AI use erodes understanding first and judgement second: cognitive debt turns into cognitive surrender, where the model's answer simply becomes your answer.

    Their wordsthe first is cognitive debt. So the more that you use AI, it's it's sort of the erosion of your ability to have good memory and have good understanding of the problems that you're working on. And the natural follow-up to that is cognitive surrender, which is where you, you know, you blindly give in to whatever the AI says as your answer.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 1:01:42 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmaniyoutube.com 10th of 22 in this recording

    Interesting

  21. Our reading

    You have to keep enough understanding of how a system works to fix it yourself, because the alternative is hoping and praying the agent can figure it out.

    Their wordsI think that we still need to understand enough about how things work so that if something does go wrong, we're actually able to fix it and not just hope and pray that the agent is able to figure things out.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 1:02:30 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmaniyoutube.com 11th of 22 in this recording

    Interesting

  23. Our reading

    Reading every agent trajectory has stopped being possible, and what replaces it is demanding an end-to-end account of the decisions that were made.

    Their wordsThe first thing I do is I try to make sure that if there is a summary at the very end, here are all the decisions that were made, I will read through that end to end. If there hasn't been, I will prompt for that decision process.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 1:04:14 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmaniyoutube.com 12th of 22 in this recording

    Interesting

  25. Our reading

    Working with a coding agent should leave both of you better every day, and that only happens if you deliberately record what was learned and decided in the session.

    Their wordsI'm a really big fan of this idea of mutual amplification. If you are working with an agent, a coding agent, there are a lot of things that you can do to make sure that the agent is getting better every day and you as an engineer are getting better every day.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 1:04:45 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmaniyoutube.com 13th of 22 in this recording

    Interesting

  27. Our reading

    Building a system that does the prompting for you is not a break with software history but the next rung on the same ladder of rising abstraction.

    Their wordsAnd it's effectively the next step of, you know, every phase of of software evolution is just like a rising tide of abstractions. This is the next abstraction.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 1:06:42 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmaniyoutube.com 14th of 22 in this recording

    Interesting

  29. Our reading

    Letting automated loops build everything without guardrails on blast radius and on quality is a recipe for disaster.

    Their wordsBut, simply just having your loops build everything without having some guardrails around the blast radius without having guardrails around how you think about quality, I think is a recipe for disaster.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 1:07:26 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmaniyoutube.com 15th of 22 in this recording

    Interesting

  31. Our reading

    Whatever humans are still better at than models is alpha that decays with every model release, so the skill worth naming today will not be the one worth naming next year.

    Their wordswhat what is the current thing that models are not very good at doing? Alpha is going to decay in some way with every model release or every series of model releases. So, it's going to change over time.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 1:13:27 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmaniyoutube.com 16th of 22 in this recording

    Interesting

  33. Our reading

    An agent can tell you whether a thing looks correct against a spec; it cannot tell you whether the thing is any good.

    Their wordsAn agent can tell you if a thing looks correct, if it's matching a spec. It doesn't necessarily mean it can tell you what's good.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 1:13:59 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmaniyoutube.com 17th of 22 in this recording

    Interesting

  35. Our reading

    What engineers will stay valuable for is being answerable for a system — the named person who decides what ships, what is blocked and what is deferred, whoever or whatever wrote the code.

    Their wordsBut they're the person that's on the hook for understanding, for gating, for making sure that someone is deciding what ships, what's blocked, what do we defer. And so, I think that that is something that engineers are going to continue to be valuable for.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 1:15:29 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmaniyoutube.com 18th of 22 in this recording

    Interesting

  37. Our reading

    Every time software has become easier to create, the world has created exponentially more of it, and this time will be no exception.

    Their wordsevery time that we've made it easier to create software, we've exponentially created more of it.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 1:16:47 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmaniyoutube.com 19th of 22 in this recording

    Interesting

  39. Our reading

    Now that anyone can generate a body of text, the only thing that justifies asking for a reader's time is whether the idea itself is worth reading.

    Their wordsnow that it is very easy for anyone to use an agent to create a body of text, I think it's more important than ever for us to make sure that the ideas we're putting out in the world are actually worth people reading.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 1:18:49 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmaniyoutube.com 20th of 22 in this recording

    Interesting

  41. Our reading

    Editing your writing with a model pulls it towards one homogeneous style, far enough that you lose track of what your own voice was.

    Their wordsthe models are going to in some cases, I think, provide a homogeneous take on what writing looks like. And you start to feel like, wait, what was my writing style, you know?
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 1:26:03 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmaniyoutube.com 21st of 22 in this recording

    Interesting

  43. Our reading

    Engineering, product and UX roles are converging, so the career advice that matters now is: do not just be an engineer.

    Their wordsAnd if you can show employers that you are not just a builder, but you are someone that can help them as these roles start to become a little bit fuzzier. I think that you can be successful in these times. Don't just be an engineer.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 1:29:59 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmaniyoutube.com 22nd of 22 in this recording

    design

    Interesting