“Developer loyalty is at zero right now”: Google doesn’t care which AI coding tool you use

“Developer loyalty is at zero right now,” Richard Seroter, Google Cloud’s Senior Director and Chief Evangelist, told The New Stack in a frank interview at the Google Cloud Next conference last week. For a company that offers many developer tools — and maybe too many — that’s a tough position to be in. But Seroter isn’t worried about it.

“Our job is that we should make it easy. If you want to build with AI or if you build AI apps, we should be excellent at both and be the best at both. We are not ceding anything. We will be the best at AI dev tools. We’re gonna get there — always. I mean, that’s everybody’s goal. We’re gonna keep pushing there,” Seroter said.

“Developer loyalty is at zero right now.”

But Google is also pragmatic there. Even if a developer isn’t using Google’s developer tools, it still wants to be the platform where the code runs.

That also extends to the experience of using models — and anyone’s models…