Google has an near monopoly on Internet ads (or rather a duo-poly combined with Facebook). Having such an monopoly makes them have hindsights on what they are doing and how they are failing, or even if they do, the incentives and management just aren't cleanly aligned with what ought to be the case.

Google has always been a bunker corporation, they exist only on shielded campuses and never interface with normal people or reality. One of the additional consequences of never concerning themselves with providing customer service for most of their products. They have no idea what's actually going on on the ground, until long after it has shaken the world (ChatGPT). They're deeply isolated from the front and from proper feedback iteration mechanisms.

wow that is a really good way to describe it.

> "AI Studio is legitimately the worst UX experience on the internet."

I find it hard to believe there aren't worse ones out there. But off the top of my head I actually can't think of any...

Quite incredible that you can say a sentence like that, while talking about something within Google(/Alphabet) that's actually an important area for them (not just some little side project), and yet it isn't hyperbolic it's sincere. Anyone there overseeing it should truly feel embarrassed.

The average SAP internal app is probably worse.

Off the top of my head: workaday

Workday looks horrible but at least it's functional. AI Studio is neither and I get a headache even thinking about using it

ADP: looks like shit and doesn't work. Also, there are apparently no alternatives.

“Myself” is the top nav item to see anything relevant.

Literally every internal IBM tool interface.

Years ago I tried navigating the IBM website to download CPLEX (I think it was freely available for academic use, can't remember). I've forgotten the details now, but I still remember how bloated, slow and just plain bad that site was -- it felt like there were layers of unusability.

Concurs is terrible.

At Google, impossible projects are possible and easy projects feel impossible.

Eric Schmidt even predicted the issue in How Google Works, there are "whales" who have no business staying in their role but have become so senior that they basically control entire small towns worth of people.

I have the most naive question, why not change this if they know this? American companies regularly do restructuring and layoffs. Why can't these whales be dealt with that way?

It's difficult, if not impossible, to measure the impact of individual SWEs. The challenge of measuring the impact of managers in charge of large quantities of SWEs is surely an order of magnitude more difficult.

I imagine this is compounded by the fact that anybody who has risen to control of a fiefdom at a prestigious place at Google is surely highly intelligent, driven, and is either highly competent or at least highly adept at projecting competence. I can't imagine spectacularly obvious dunces rise to such heights at Google.

To be clear... I'm a million miles from Google and have zero inside knowledge, just speculating

What's so tough about this though? Someone is responsible for this shit show, make them accountable. In the abstract you may be right but this isn't abstract

It's not hard, it's just that silicon valley is obsessed with quantitative metrics, which are fucking stupid.

Just make a judgement call. It might be completely wrong a small % of the time, which is better than being mostly wrong all of the time.

> At Google, impossible projects are possible and easy projects feel impossible.

I wonder: is this still true? The impossible projects being possible part, I mean. What projects has Google done recently that would be impossible for other large tech companies like Meta, SpaceX, Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc to do?

My sense is this used to be sort of true, but hasn't been true for a while. And the "easy projects feel impossible" part unfortunately does seem like it's still true, at least, looking in from the outside.

It's not 2003 anymore. The one we'll never know is how would GitHub be doing if Google had bought them instead of Microsoft.

There's a difference between impossible projects are possible at Google, and no one else can do the impossible. If you really want to get into it, why didn't Google do Starlink? Project Loom was the shittier, cheaper version of Starlink.

What Google's done lately though is Waymo. Other companies are doing it, but holy shit, I can call a taxi that drives itself?

they should be fired immediately (and never be recruited to touch any real product)

I wanted to pay them money to try their things. I just literally couldn't figure out how to do it. I think I then managed to get some trial credits but I never managed to activate anything with them and hit API limit after basically one prompt.

Our team figured out the only stable way to do this was to either use OpenRouter for API, or for subscriptions, to get Ultra Gemini accounts on personal Gmail accounts (no way to do this for individual members of an org without upgrading the entire org!) and hook those to the Antigravity CLI which Claude Code can then orchestrate for second opinions.

Which are amazing! Argon’s insights on code review and copywriting are phenomenal, and make these hoops well worth it! But geez, it’s horrifying that we had to figure this out!

Are you sure about Argon? My experience has been it seems to understand code but it completely destroyed a couple of projects I was working on. Others like Theo used it to work on T3 Code and said it benchmaxxed and was atrocious.

We use it primarily in the context of a code reviewer, and it occasionally finds subtle security/workflow/backwards-compat issues that Claude and GPT do not. Claude makes final judgments on whether the findings are material and how they should be fixed.

Argon also tends to write particularly warm copy and external messages - unsurprising with Google's particular access to email data and caches of writing from the early internet.

We haven't really used it to write code from scratch - generally, we're wary of these exact things, and feel like Claude continues to have good enough architectural instincts that we've doubled down into the Claude ecosystem, with mods and tooling (including a multi-agent reviewer) that accelerate our workflows.

A year ago I was trying their enterprise code offering and for the life of me I could not get it let me use a gemini 3+ model. I enabled everything in like 5 different interfaces and the GeminiCLI and UIs would only show me 2.5.

Eventually I gave up. Anthropic/OpenAI took < 10 minutes to get things going.

Slightly off topic, but I feel like pointing out that this is not limited to their recent/model offerings. I recently had to once again enable both Sign in with Apple and Google, yet despite having done so at least three times throughout my life (Auth0 back in the day, BetterAuth last year, now WorkOS AuthKit) and having access to modern models, it was an exercise in frustration, outdated official documentation and permissions errors that were beyond inconsistent, at least on the GCP side.

Enabling the same service via Apple Developers meanwhile took me minutes and I never felt lost, confused or frustrated.

Azure did this.

Those devs were clearly a lot smarter than me, then.

They do return their services if you search for the name of some AWS services, which is helpful.

Me too! I wanted to just make an api call to get my current spend on google models.. and like 50 steps of creating this and that and linking it to here and then giving it this and that permissions, and being told this isn't acruall real time, you've just set up a query to be run against your data into this new data lake, and come back and check tomorrow.. I still couldn't get anything to work..

I paid for their AI models on the app because I wanted to try the Gemini experience on my device but its utterly incohesive, I just cant use my subscription anywhere else. Anthropic is close but at least they started offering API credits recently so my workflows dont break, but with google man.... its a horrible experience. Won't renew, thats for sure.

skill issue

Ironically, Gemini is excellent with UI/UX, and somehow they can't use it to improve themselves.

If you have ever worked for a large company you can quickly imagine why they cant execute. Google is old now and entrenched. We will see how long it takes them to become IBM/GE etc. (if they are not already headed that direction).

Do they still have 5 messaging apps or did they finally trim it down.

It's odd that everybody recognizes this, yet these huge institutions keep hiring as if they're at the cutting edge. You could grab people off the street to fix the obvious problems, but they're not "qualified." The people pushing out shitty products somehow are, though.

>For a company with unlimited cash and the ability to hire the best talent

Right. They lack no resources. Therefore, what is happening must be what they want to happen.

I've worked in some pretty big global orgs. Everything was decided by committee which meant that everything had to work for everybody, which meant that everything was shit. I spent some of the best years of my life building and rebuilding the same bullshit. I think I shipped a handful of truly novel experiences in that time (probably about one novel feature every 2 years) but the rest was beating a dead horse to make the experiences we already had "better."

Eng was neutered at that large org. Product people had the "vision" and the say. A lot of product people just used our team's product as a stepping stone onto their next role and in the end it showed. I would hope Google has a better culture...but theres a good chance it doesn't.

No, it's exactly because of the copious resources.

Vertex AI existed as an ML platform before the GenAI era. DeepMind was doing it's thing in another silo. Then Gemini products came along. Then they acquired the Windsurf folks.

A smaller company would have no choice but to focus on one team and one product. Google has a Darwinian ecosystem and someone has to come along and smash teams together, clumsily refactoring the technology and user journeys.

Their employees read HN though and their VPs hear customers complain about onboarding. I hear there is an effort underway to create one unified agentic platform.

they are certainly aware of the complaints. but no one is forcing them to release half-baked garbage. they are choosing to. no one is forcing them to smash teams together. they are choosing to. no one is forcing anything; google is making its own decisions. this is not new, especially not from google. therefore, what we experience must be what they want. i just don't see how anyone can reasonably conclude anything otherwise.

Youtube does not order search results correctly, for which there are only two root cause explanations available: they are halfwits, or they are assholes. For many years I assumed the latter, but these days I’m equivocal, so maybe it’s both.

It's actually insane, I can't find anything with more than 5 views for some terms (as in it only shows videos with no views when searching topics which i know are popular). I mostly assume that their management is so awful that different departments somehow make things completely unusable every now and then.

They're banned from using Opus-5.5 or other competitor models so they can't fix it.

Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.1 are available now

Agreed.

When I signed a few devs at work up for Gemini for Code I had to go into Google Cloud, jump through several different screens, assign special permissions to each dev to make it work and even when it did work...it was insanely confusing compared to every other option out there.

It's to the point where I'm better off asking Grok Bot set it up for me rather than ever deal with figuring it out again.

> AI Studio is legitimately the worst UX experience

Their backend looks very confused too. I consume their models through OpenRouter and requests are processed randomly by AI Studio or Vertex. API key management had several entry points for a while too, with the option to query the same model with a GCP, Firebase and/or AI Studio API key.

isn't the random choice of AI Studio or Vertex a feature of OpenRouter?

you could pin the provider to always get one or the other

Interesting, I've noticed their safety controls are random and bizarre as well, which may depend where it gets routed. There are multiple ways for a request to fail, even for the same reasons, with different error codes and different messaging.

> the ability to hire the best talent

Is this true anymore? I feel like a lot of the best talent have better opportunities elsewhere where they won't get bogged down by entrenched bureaucracy. Not to mention the Google interview process and physical locations filter out a lot of talented people from even wanting to apply.

Yeah Tibo has a tweet where he talks about how he tried to do stuff at Google and they just wouldn't let him. Doesn't matter how much $ and talent you have if you are actively sandbagging them (and of course, for truly great stuff, you want the whole org from the very top driving you on, a la Musk or Jobs).

https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2083596911060324570?a=iif1W7...

What about Workday? That's the standard in terms of horrible experience.

What's wrong with it? I haven't used it, just curious to hear its faults

I love when my kid and and I are using AI Studio to make tower defense games, and it tries to squeeze in reasons to make Gemini API calls. No, I don't want a Gemini-populated random news ticker in my tower defense game.

> For a company with unlimited cash and the ability to hire the best talent, I just don’t get it

It's been a baffling question for over a decade (or more)

> For a company with unlimited cash and the ability to hire the best talent

This could be used as a preface for so many things.

> AI Studio is legitimately the worst UX experience on the internet

This. There are so many hoops to jump, so many links to click, so many pages to read. I just don't know why people would even bother with it.

My guess is that some GCP's VP won the argument that Gemini must go through AI Studio. These VPs don't use their product, so they don't give a shit about UX. As for their engineers and product managers? Well, that beats me.

> and the ability to hire the best talent

unfortunately, the so-called "best talent" is being hired in management, not engineering or design or UX. :-(

Agreed. One genuine question I have is: how is this not a five alarm fire at Google? What are the set of constraints that have made this unable to be solved?

The effort to fix it vs. the risk seems weirdly asymmetrical. Why do all the hard things right and then trip up at the last hurdle?

>the ability to hire the best talent

No longer true. Not since Ruth Porat IBMified the compensation policy in the name of efficiency. Btw this is exactly you can't get away with underpaying tech talent - something new will come along that threatens to eat your lunch and if your team doesn't have the best people, you're finished. And you can't change employer reputation overnight.

> For a company with unlimited cash and the ability to hire the best talent, I just don’t get it.

You also have to hire for taste.

I enjoy the level of control AI studio gives me, especially over the context. I can easily branch a conversation into new sessions from anywhere, delete any message, and explicitly turn on/off web search.

Claude used to allow editing prompts which created branches, but imo it was a much crappier version of branching versus what I could do in AI studio. Alas, Anthropic have even removed that functionality for some reason (if someone knows how to branch in Claude please lmk).

Sometimes I just want to block off all web search and sample from LLM’s knowledge only. I guess I can tell Claude to not search the web, but I prefer doing it deterministically like AI studio.

I also like that I can set a different system prompt per session, and all my system prompts get autosaved for future use.

I find it quite surprising that with all this AI, my history of sessions is still such a mess despite my efforts to keep it organized (in both AI Studio and Claude). At least Claude finally added folders, but they are still buggy (for sessions older than a few months, for example).