Shipped the biggest thing I've worked on so far!
So there was this massive legacy code migration that needed to happen across the codebase. Hundreds of files, tedious work, the kind of thing where a team of engineers would normally grind through it manually over multiple quarters. I pitched an idea to leadership: what if we used AI agents to do it instead?
They said yes.
I wrote the design doc, built the orchestration system, created the specialized agents, and launched it. When we added it all up, the automated workflow saved over 300 engineer hours! That's what the tracking actually showed. Multiple quarters of drudge work, handled systematically by agents.
Separately, I also built an IDE extension that lets anyone on my team create and use custom AI agents right in their editor. It was a 20% project (Google lets you spend some time on side initiatives) and it ended up being one of the first few extensions of its kind at Google! About 16 people are using it weekly now, which for a team-level tool is pretty solid.
The whole AI tooling space at Google is moving insanely fast. I've been trying to stay at the front of it, partly because I genuinely think it's the most interesting work happening right now, and partly because I got a peer review that said I was doing this "to a degree that's unusual for a new engineer." Which I'm choosing to take as a compliment.
I also went back to Queens College as a Campus Advocate, spending a week doing workshops on AI tools, resume prep, and technical interview practice for 200+ students. Full circle moment! A year earlier I was attending every single Google event at Queens College, hanging out with the Google reps and hearing stories about what it's like to work there. Now I got to be on the other side of the podium, flexing my retired teacher skills and showing QC students that you don't need to come from Stanford or MIT. Queens College has been on the rise lately, with way more students landing big tech offers than usual.
Imposter syndrome is basically gone at this point. I can solidly say I no longer identify as a teacher and now feel like a software engineer and a solid contributor with unique strengths in my own right.
Three years since I was debugging that CS50 Credit problem for four hours straight, and now I'm building agents that automate months of engineering work. That timeline is genuinely hard to believe sometimes.