Google CEO Pichai says company lags in agentic coding

Image credit: Search Engine Journal

Google CEO Sundar Pichai acknowledged the company lags behind competitors in agentic coding, tool use, and long-horizon tasks, according to an interview on the New York Times Hard Fork podcast.

Pichai said Google is working to close this gap, despite its strong foundational models in text, multimodality, voice, audio, and reasoning capabilities.

The chief executive attributed Google’s current position in agentic coding to a lack of external product surfaces that generate developer data flows, a benefit enjoyed by rivals such as Anthropic with its Cursor product.

To address this, Google is developing Antigravity 2.0, a standalone desktop application designed to facilitate agent-based coding workflows, Pichai said.

This new tool is experiencing rapid internal usage growth, indicating its potential to help Google catch up in the segment, according to Pichai.

Pichai also addressed early complaints regarding Gemini 3.5 Flash, Google’s latest model, which included concerns about pricing, model quality regressions, and tightened usage limits.

He promised prompt fixes for these issues and ongoing progress on usage limits for the model.

The interview provided a more direct competitive assessment than the messaging presented during Google’s recent I/O keynote event.

Source: Search Engine Journal