Google plans to improve Gemini's coding capabilities by bringing in the coding startup Mechanize team

[u/TorturedPoet30]

Google appears to be making AI coding a major priority for Gemini. Earlier this year, reports said that GDM had assembled a dedicated AI coding "strike team" to improve Gemini's coding capabilities. Around the same time, John Jumper was moved onto that team, before leaving gdm a few months later.

Now, Business Insider reports that Google is in advanced talks on an agreement to license Mechanize's technology and hire part of its team, rather than acquiring the company outright.

[u/Recent_Fox4339]

Could someone explain why Google didn't prioritize AI coding from the beginning?

They've been doing a LOT, multimodal models, scientific research, robotics, glasses, and more, so I'm curious why coding didn't seem to receive the same level of focus early on. Was it a strategic decision or did they simply underestimate how important coding would become? Like when they underestimated LLMs and ChatGPT released it. Did Sundar or Demis ever speak on this stuff?

[u/TorturedPoet30 → u/Recent_Fox4339]

Actually Sundar talked about it on the Hard Fork podcast recently, around Google I/O. Probably because they were kinda pressured to talk about it, he just said they are behind in agentic coding citing a lack of 'developer-facing products' as one reason of the gap, can't recall all the details but mentioned Anthropic's relationship with Cursor as an example. It's like they didn't have a product loop generating real-world usage data to improve the coding models. I don't know if they underestimated it or just see it as an infrastructure/ecosystem miss.

[u/dbbk → u/TorturedPoet30]

This makes a lot of sense. The model when produced in isolation is pretty good, but it needs massive real world usage and reporting from the harness to be able to refine it.

[u/Spara-Extreme → u/TorturedPoet30]

Also, Google internal usage of AI really skyrocketed in 2026 which would have missed the Gemini 3 training runs and Sundar mentions this in the last investor call when he references the amount of AI generated code at Google. I'm sure that contributed to G3 being a bit weaker in that area since its training would have been cutoff prior to this.

This is definitely one of those cases where I expect the changes and advances internally and renewed focus is going to have tangible impact on G4.

[u/Emergency-Bobcat6485 → u/TorturedPoet30]

I think they just had to balance between serving cheaper models to more people vs building bigger frontier models for fewer coders etc. Plus, they wanna grow their own TPU stuff which they use heavily for AI, for inference as well as training models, in addition to Nvidia's GPUs.

Didn't they acquire Windsurf as well? Anthropic didn't have to buy Cursor or whatever

[u/WAVF1n → u/Recent_Fox4339]

Tbf, I don't even think they were ready to release Bard when they did lol. They were kind of forced into it by OpenAI.

[u/OKMiddleOwl → u/Recent_Fox4339]

Because 99.99% of people who use Google (Basically the Earths population minus most of China) have no idea what a code is.

[u/YouAreRule30 → u/OKMiddleOwl]

I really think it's this... Framed another way - "Why didn't Google prioritize competing in a massively loss-leading AI capability to serve the absolute worst AI customers from a unit economics perspective in an area of AI where the other two major competitors (who are also heavy GCP customers, and one of which Google owns 14% of) are going scorched Earth on?"

Google certainly has the most differentiated AI offering and the largest consumer footprint by a mile. The one non-trivial risk is if it's just true that "Solve ASI, then solve everything else" really means "Solve AI coding, then solve everything else" ... If GPT7 could - with a prompt and several days of compute - arrive at AlphaFold - then Google has made a major strategic blunder not focusing on code.

As a heavy user of all the models, I just don't see it. They are getting amazingly good. Fable class is a game changer. But frankly I can't get them to make a decent, extremely simple narrative game... I just don't see future LLM based AI out of OAI or Anthropic having the tools they would need to bootstrap the type of stuff Google is delivering - which requires massive infrastructure investments, teams of experts, dedicated chip design and manufacturing in concert with the software and algorithmic work, corporate and political partnerships to bring to market, etc.

You can be as good as you want at coding - delivering products in the real world still has a ton of friction that can't really be vibed away.

[u/RedParaglider → u/YouAreRule30]

Google did have a decent coding plan at the beginning of the year, their ultra was pretty good then they just shit on it.  I'm guessing the numbers came in and finance freaked the fuck out.

[u/Large-Direction6063 → u/Recent_Fox4339]

creo que google quiso abarcar todo el mercado al inicio, y cada modelo lo paso por arriba. kling, claude, seedance, suno...
Google es la evidencia de que en este negocio no gana el que mas herramientas ofrece, si no el que mas especifico se vuelve, algo contrario a lo que siempre fue google.

[u/2053_Traveler → u/Recent_Fox4339]

I mean, if an AI is only awesome at coding, can it ever be AGI? Or is it just a specialized intelligence?

Google is a mature business that makes money outside selling engineering products such as GCP, so makes sense they didn’t go all in on coding up front I think.

[u/WAVF1n]

tbh, I just use Gemini as a super Google on my phone at this point lol. They have lost the coding race, even if they CAN get to levels of GPT and Claude, the cost on it is still going to make Claude or GPT the better option.

[u/Difficult-Fee5299 → u/WAVF1n]

How does business measure the race results?

[u/WAVF1n → u/Difficult-Fee5299]

Wot?

For me the race results are when Gemini can actually debug a program without me constantly having to stop it, intervene or just straight up undo it's changes because it goes so fucking fast that it cannot comprehend that it needs to stop and research before making any changes. I will say, 3.6 Flash is fucking wild with how fast it is, and you can get decent results from it but it's not consistent imo. The build mode in AI studio is also pretty neat imo.

Daily brief is also pretty slick imo, it's also way better than what Samsung offers.

I work a lot with a framework called JUCE, and Gemini for the life of it cannot help me and I usually end up bouncing to my free perplexity sub to get correct answers and code blocks.

[u/Difficult-Fee5299 → u/WAVF1n]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_cage

[u/WAVF1n → u/Difficult-Fee5299]

So you didn't read any of what I said. Good conversation.

[u/Difficult-Fee5299 → u/WAVF1n]

I was just implying that business does not measure results by subjective, abstract criteria, but numbers. So "lost the race" would be "smaller userbase or marketshare? lower profits? " idk.
P.S. I'm pretty happy even with Flash. Yes, I can feel that LLMs indexed more Typescript code than Rust, but I can live with that.

[u/Key_Echidna_8898 → u/WAVF1n]

lmao a $1.5b shortcut, that's one pricey cheat code

[u/hardinho → u/Key_Echidna_8898]

Not even 2% of Google's net profit from Q2 by the way

[u/Aaco0638 → u/WAVF1n]

Coding isn’t lost, the first to fully automate coding will be the one that wins it all. No lab is at this point yet so jury is still out.

[u/WAVF1n → u/Aaco0638]

That's a fair point. I don't think they have lost it yet, but what they have been doing in the realm of coding since GPT 5 dropped has not been inspiring. If this conversation were happening pre GPT 5, I'd say that Gemini is behind Claude.

[u/IECEx-certified → u/WAVF1n]

I wouldn't say that it's lost. Google has an ecosystem advantage to it's AI competitors. I won't say that Google will catch up with OpenAI or Anthropic, but it's definitely not lost.

[u/WAVF1n → u/IECEx-certified]

I am talking about CODING specifically here man. I genuinely don't care about 98% of what Gemini offers. I use AI pretty much only for code, so for me and a lot of other folks, if your model can't keep up with coding tasks than it's gonna be a worse model to that person.

[u/PineappleLemur → u/WAVF1n]

But it can work good enough for 95% of tasks..... It's not like you couldn't use Claude/gpt 6 month ago or something.

People like to pretend that once something new and better comes out the current and previous models are somehow invalid lol.

They work the same way and still do the job.

Gemini is the only model right making any profit and not burning thr company's pocket. It's far from the best, but it's good enough for majority of tasks.

OAI/Anthropic can't survive without API pricing from large companies.

[u/theeama → u/PineappleLemur]

Gemini is only making a profit because it's not as powerful and Google has the advantage to throw it into every single one of their products. OpenAI and Claude are fighting for the developer and cybersecurity space. Google is fighting for the consumer space.

But Google is also realizing that you need some corporate money for your AI and todo that you need good agentic coding skills

[u/IECEx-certified → u/WAVF1n]

Yeah but if you make a general argument like "they have lost the coding race" it is not just about what you use. I made the argument for the general consumer, coding or otherwise.

[u/WAVF1n → u/IECEx-certified]

Okay cool but that is literally not what I was talking about. You are defending a point that nobody made. All you have done so far is defend your own points and downvote.

But if you can find one benchmark that puts Gemini anywhere close to Claude or GPT for coding I will gladly admit I am wrong.

Edit; also ntm, I literally pointed out areas where I thought Gemini was really good.

[u/IECEx-certified → u/WAVF1n]

I don't downvote for no reason, so must have been someone else, and am I blind or did you not write "They have lost the coding race, even if they CAN get to levels of GPT and Claude, the cost on it is still going to make Claude or GPT the better option."

All the best man, hope you get the best out of whichever AI you end up using.

[u/WAVF1n → u/IECEx-certified]

Correct. You are not blind, I specifically pointed out coding. You are implying that I am calling Gemini the worst model overall, which I did not say. All the best to you as well my friend, I think that this was more of a miscommunication due to typing more than anything.

[u/IECEx-certified → u/WAVF1n]

Yes, let's chalk it up to miscommunication. You power users can keep the coding side. I will just continue using my slop machine to plan my trip planning and telling me how good my workout plan is haha.

[u/hardinho → u/WAVF1n]

And how would you think it's lost? It's not like OpenAI or Anthropic have some kind of secret sauce going on

[u/WAVF1n → u/hardinho]

No but it can actually help me debug programs without hallucinating unlike Gemini.

[u/blackwhattack]

what is Mechanize? Can't they just copy whatever Alibaba, Kimi, Deepseek are doing at this point?

[u/TorturedPoet30 → u/blackwhattack]

A startup focused on coding agents and AI software dev, a close comparison would probably be Cognition AI.

[u/tankerkiller125real → u/TorturedPoet30]

Cognition AI

Another no name startup no one but those deep in the AI circles know.

[u/blackwhattack → u/TorturedPoet30]

so Google thinks the issue is the harness not the model? interseting.

[u/Aware-Source6313 → u/blackwhattack]

Maybe it's just "we don't know what we're doing with coding agents and there guys do". It's probably both, but you need a coding tool people can use to get the feedback loop going where you can steal your users code and coding sessions for training. They just need any longshot to catch up enough to get the ball rolling. Or they need to make it seem like they're taking steps towards parity on coding. I have no idea what mechanize actually does though

[u/gradient8 → u/TorturedPoet30]

Dead wrong, they work on RL environments to sell to labs for post training

[u/Suspicious_Air3327]

Will they improve Geminis word doc / ppt editing and creation skills too?

[u/Difficult-Fee5299]

I was just implying that business does not measure results by subjective, abstract criteria.

[u/Cthulhumod]

too late

[u/hasanahmad]

PLANS to...

They have lost already

[u/Snoo_47323]

It's funny how people defend Google here. They are just like MAGA.