How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna

There's a lot of talk about productivity gains through AI. There's this camp of people who are, like, so overhyped. Nothing's working. Nobody's actually adopting this at scale. We see a significant amount of gains. We find engineering teams that are very, very AI forward are recording about eight to ten hours save per week. Whenever I hear a stat like this, I think an important element is this is the worst it will ever be. This is now the baseline. The truth is the value is changing every day, so you need to ride that wave along with it. There's a story I heard you share on a different podcast where there's an engineer who has Goose watch him. He'll be talking to a colleague on Slack or an email, and they'll be discussing some feature that they think is useful to implement. Now a few hours later, he'll find that Goose has already tried to build that feature and opened a PR for it on Git. What level of engineer is most benefiting from these tools? What's been surprising and really amazing? The non technical people using AI agents and programming tools to build things. The people that are able to embrace it, to optimize for their particular work day and their particular set of tasks are really showing the most impact from these tools. How do you think things will look in a couple years in terms of how engineers work that's different from today? All these LLMs are sitting idle overnight and on weekends while humans aren't there. Like, there's no need for that. They should be working all the time. They should be trying to build in anticipation of what we want. What's maybe the most counterintuitive lesson you've learned about building products or building teams? A lot of engineers think that code quality is important to building a successful product. The two have nothing to do with each other. Today, my guest is Danji Prasanna, Danji's chief technology officer at Block, where he oversees a team of over 3,500 people. With Danji's leadership, Block has become one of the most AI native large companies in the world and has basically achieved what many eng and product leaders are trying to achieve within their companies. In our conversation, we chat about their internal open source agent called Goose that, by their measure, is saving employees on average eight to ten hours a week of work time, and that number is going up. How AI specifically making their teams more productive and the teams that are benefiting most? Interestingly, it's not the engineering team. What it took to shift the culture to be very AI oriented, the very boring change they made internally that boosted productivity even more than any AI tool, also lessons from building Google Wave and Google Plus and Cash App, and so much more. This episode is for anyone curious to see what a highly AI forward technology driven large company looks …