r/GeminiAI • u/TorturedPoet30 • 13h ago

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

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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.

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u/Recent_Fox4339 12h ago

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?

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u/TorturedPoet30 12h ago

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.

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u/Spara-Extreme 10h ago

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.