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Jeff Dean

What Jeff Dean thinks about coding agents

@jeff-dean · 22 positions · On ppll ↗

Chief Scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research, at Google since 1999, where he co-created MapReduce, Bigtable, TensorFlow and the TPU.

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Only Jeff Dean on coding agents. See everyone on coding agents

3 dated positions, 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Jeff Dean has said — not written or endorsed by them.

3 positions so far — this page is not yet offered to search engines.

  1. Our readingAI models have reached the level of a junior engineer on longer-running, agent-based coding tasks.

    Their wordsYeah, I mean I feel like uh the models have been getting a lot better at sort of agent-based longer running coding tasks and it seems pretty clear that they are now actually pretty capable and depending on exactly your definition of of junior engineer it seems pretty spot-on I would say.

    ↗Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AIyoutube.com 1st of 22 in this recording

  3. Our readingSpecifying what you want matters more now that agents write the code than it did when the work went to a human who could ask follow-up questions.

    Their wordsSo we've always told computer scientists from the very beginning that really it's really important to specify what it is, what's the software that you're writing is trying to accomplish before then going and writing it. And so now we actually have agent-based systems that can do the writing, but the importance of specifying what what it is you want has actually gone up because before you'd be handing it off to a very intelligent human who maybe has context or can ask you follow-up questions.

    ↗Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AIyoutube.com 16th of 22 in this recording

  5. Our readingTranslating software from one programming language to another is where coding agents already excel, because the existing code is a perfect specification.

    Their wordsUm, and to give you an example of a a a use of a coding agent that works extremely well is you can ask today's models to translate software from one computer language to another very effectively because in that case you actually have a incredibly detailed specification.

    ↗Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AIyoutube.com 17th of 22 in this recording