> Google somehow managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of success

This is still very early days. Who is "on top" has flipped back and forth many times already. The next frontier model release (from whomever) will change things again.

I don't think it's that early tbh, agentic coding has ~90% adoption in the US.

Claude Code has largely won individual developer mindshare and has been on top ever since it came out. The benchmarks change, but almost nobody opts to use anything other than Claude IME when I ask them. Enterprise is more competitive since they care about costs and other things, but developers leaning towards Claude puts a thumb on the scales there.

The product doesn't have much lock in, so it is possible to dislodge Claude, and Anthropic could (and some may argue is likely to) just shoot themselves in the foot again and again and again, but Google has never been particularly good at enterprise sales, and they have never actually been at the frontier of intelligence.

I think Google's incentives have mostly about building models for their products, which makes them focus more on the cheap end, and while they need that, it feels like the Innovator's Dilemma is biting them here.

I own a lot of Google stock from working there in the past and have been quite happy about their trajectory up until the last 6 months, but I am getting pretty antsy about their AI story these days.

Early days or not, Google fucking deleted my IDE and wiped my settings. It took them days to roll out a fix, by which point I had migrated off Antigravity.

I guess? Maybe I'm alone here but I don't feel like Fable is particularly more useful than Sonnet most of the time. I feel like the LLMs are good enough for the majority of uses and the hyper expensive premium ones are way into diminishing returns. At this point with Kimi being as good as it is, if they jack up the price any more I'll just go open source.

I don't think that's true if the reason a company has left the vendor for given model by making it hard to buy. Enterprise IT is enough of a pain in the butt that people will forego the new shiny to avoid the old painful unless it's genuinely better. As you say though, the best frontier model flips regularly, so companies won't go through the hassle of deploying a model if it's proved horrible to do in the past. They'll just skip that model because their current one is fine.

Model quality is only one aspect, the bigger problem is making it work in a fully integrated enterprise platform, and Google has always been lacking when it came to the latter.

At this rate, if Google has a flagship model, you're better off plugging it into a competitor's tooling than hope Google figures out how to use it.