Claude Code Built It in an Hour: Google Took a Year, Says Google Engineer Jaana Dogan

A senior Principal Engineer at Google, Jaana Dogan (who has been with the company for nearly 10 years), said something surprising on the platform 'X.' On January 3, she shared a series of posts stating that Claude Code developed a significant software system in about 1 hour, while Google engineers took around 1 year. Anthropic's Claude Code, launched in 2023, has seen tremendous traction since early 2025. According to Claude Code, by July 2025, the tool produced 195 lines of code per week and 3 billion output tokens. So, did Jaana Dogan say that Claude Code is better than Google? What exactly did she say? Learn more.

What Did Jaana Dogan Ask Claude Code to Build?

According to Dogan, Claude Code was asked to build something called a distributed agent orchestration system:

• It's a system that controls and coordinates many AI agents at once.
• These agents may run on different machines.
• It's important that these agents talk to each other, share tasks, and work together smoothly.

Hence, it's a complex system and not beginner-level coding.

How Did Claude Code Shock Jaana Dogan?

• Previously Dogan’s Google team spent a whole building on a similar system.
• While building the system, the team experienced many debates, trade-offs, and design decisions.
• However, no solution was perfect enough to proceed with.

After Claude Code:

• Dogan resorted to Claude Code to describe the problem.
• She didn't have to give the tool detailed instructions, yet the structure made so much sense. It suggested her good design choices. 
• About an hour or so later, Claude Code produced a similar system.

Describing her feelings in the post, she said, "I’m not joking, and this isn’t funny.”

Was Claude Code’s Result Perfect?

No.

She clearly stated in her posts that:

• The output was not production-grade ready.
• It was like a mere prototype.
• However, it was comparable to what her team at Google had built over the past year. 

Why Jaana Dogan Thinks AI Built the System Fast?

She clearly explained that:

• These ideas behind these systems are not new to Google.
• Google has built multiple versions of them last year.
• And the tricky part was in the thinking, testing, and deciding, not typing code.

What has changed now:

• AI tools can bring ideas to life, turning them into working code extremely fast.
• And that saves a lot of manual effort. 

Why Do Big Companies Like Google Move More Slowly?

In her honest opinion (as shared in her 'X' posts):

• Tech giants have what's called legacy systems, which are old and slow.
• The software at these companies must handle several use cases, and that takes time.
• And teams don't agree on a single approach, which again takes a long time. 

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