Tao Dong (@taodong) header
Tao Dong (@taodong) profile picture

Human-Centered AI for Software Engineering @google. Formerly @flutterdev & @dart_lang. PhD in HCI from @umsi. Posts and replies represent personal views.

San Francisco Bay Area, USA
Joined March 2007
Photo by Tao Dong (@taodong)Photo by Tao Dong (@taodong)Photo by Tao Dong (@taodong)Photo by Tao Dong (@taodong)Photo by Tao Dong (@taodong)Photo by Tao Dong (@taodong)Photo by Tao Dong (@taodong)Photo by Tao Dong (@taodong)Photo by Tao Dong (@taodong)Photo by Tao Dong (@taodong)
🇺🇸 For a deployed service member, missing family moments adds up. Baby’s first step. The first performance. Sharing a laugh. In honor of National Day of the Deployed, we’re excited to partner with @USArmy and @The_USO to bring Google Beam to 20 locations so deployed service members can experience lifelike, 3D video connections with their loved ones. 🎥 Watch the docuseries below
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🚨 MAJOR MOBILE FEATURE 🚨 You can now record up to 1 hour of live audio directly in the mobile app. Capture lectures, team meetings, or your latest mad scientist rants and instantly use them as sources. Pro tip: Combine your live audio recordings with photos of your handwritten notes to create the ultimate personalized workspace
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Can we audit how coding agents actually behave in deployment, not just on benchmarks? We audited 20,574 real-world sessions to find where coding agents fail their users. Our paper is at #EMNLP2026, and I’m presenting today in Budapest! 🧵👇
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I've been looking into public benchmarks and am astounded by the poor quality vs. how much we rely on them as an industry. @xeophon pointed me to this excellent site epoch.ai/benchmarks/ which is an independent third party which scrutinizes benchmarks and "looks at the data" 💪 For example, here are some popular benchmarks we all rely on. Before trusting a benchmark its worth running them and inspecting examples the grader failed carefully, to get a sense of the quality. I'm continuing to look more into this, and will write something up eventually once I've collected more data, but I think this is an important subject.
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Tao Dong retweeted
We’re excited to announce the inaugural Human–AI Interaction Conference (HAIC 2027), taking place June 27–30, 2027, in Washington, DC (CFP coming soon at haic.cc). HAIC focuses on translational impact, turning human–AI research into meaningful real-world impact.
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Finally! Congrats to the team!
Lots of discussion out there about our next model(!), so I wanted to give an early look as soon as possible. Introducing Gemini 4 Argon! It shows frontier performance in complex workflows, cyber defense and software engineering. Teams are using it extensively at Google, from coding to quantum computing, great feedback. Here’s a look at the benchmarks:
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Tao Dong retweeted
efficiency, productivity, speed we keep worshipping these words like they are what we live for ship faster merge more manage more agents compress every loop remove every pause turn every hour into output but what is the point of endless production if there is no time left to think deeply? not react not optimize not summarize not clear the queue think to sit with a question long enough that your real intention starts to appear to find the purpose underneath the motion to ask whether the thing being accelerated should exist at all ai could be a new canvas a way to make strange things personal things impossible things tools, worlds, poems, games, interfaces, films, languages, rituals things that let more people touch the shape of their own imagination but instead, so much of it is becoming slop factories more content more funnels more tickets more fake work pretending to be value you can merge 2000 prs you can manage 500 agents you can wake up to dashboards proving that the machine kept moving while you slept but what is the point if you only sleep 5 hours a day? what is the point if you stop talking to other humans? stop learning about the past? stop playing? stop wandering? stop being surprised? what is the point if your whole life becomes optimizing the system that is consuming you? speed is not meaning scale is not wisdom automation is not freedom if it only makes everyone run faster and where are we running? toward what? a world where every person becomes a manager of machines, and every machine produces more things no one had the time to truly want? the danger is not that ai makes us lazy the danger is that ai makes us endlessly busy that it gives us infinite production before we have found intention infinite execution before we have developed taste infinite motion before we have learned how to be still maybe the real frontier is not more speed maybe it is discernment knowing what not to make knowing when to stop knowing when the most productive thing is to sleep, read history, call a friend, play with a cat, walk without tracking it, or stare at the ceiling until the false urgency dissolves tools should give us more life not turn life into a tool if ai is going to matter, it should not just help us produce more it should help us become more human more imaginative more free otherwise, it’s the same old factory just without humans
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Tao Dong retweeted
Take public transit, earn Waymo Cash! Introducing transit rewards 🚆💸 Available to our San Francisco Bay Area riders in the coming weeks. Read more: waymo.com/blog/2026/09/trans…
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I’m totally gonna take @Gemini_Notebook with me on my next trip. Thanks for the tip.
The camera feature in the @Gemini_Notebook mobile app is so transformative for on-the-go research. I was up in the Sierras working on a new project, and I just took photos of everything, like this museum display. Then I asked for a detailed report of all the info in the image. The text below is what I got back. (I fact-checked it myself and it was 99% accurate -- and some of the text it transcribed is so blurry in the image that it was hard for me to read it.) Next step is to generate documents like this for all the photos I took, and then ask Notebook to highlight all the information that adds something new to the existing knowledge base of sources I've already collected, or is particularly relevant to my latest writing and outline for the project. Truly magical. Mariposa Museum Exhibit Reference: Mariposa in 1859 & Gold Rush Era This reference document consolidates all text, photographic captions, historical statistics, newspaper clippings, and exhibit overlays displayed on the Mariposa Museum exhibit panel regarding Mariposa during and after the Gold Rush. 1. Exhibit Overview & Key Headlines Main Title: "THIS WAS MARIPOSA IN 1859 – ONLY 10 YEARS AFTER THE GOLD RUSH BEGAN." Historical Context Sub-headline: "PORTIONS OF THE TOWN HAD BEEN REBUILT AFTER THE FIRE OF 1858.. & PARTS OF IT WERE DOOMED TO BE DESTROYED IN 1866" Display Overview: The exhibit centers on a large 1850s panoramic photograph of Mariposa, annotated with street names, landmark locations, and population statistics, flanked by contemporary hotel advertisements, fire reports, medical artifacts, and photographs of civic buildings. 2. Demographic & Real Estate Statistics (1850s vs. Present) MetricHistorical Value (1850s Gold Rush Peak)Modern Value Town Population~3,000 residents~1,800 estimated Entire Mariposa Diggings Area~15,000 residents— Commercial Establishments15 to 20 stores & saloons, plus hotels— Town Lot Prices00 to 00 per lot— 3. Background Photograph & Civic Infrastructure Background Photo Date: Taken in the 1850s, capturing the rapid growth of the settlement following the initial gold strike. 1854 Mariposa County Courthouse: Shown in the background panorama prior to the construction of its iconic clock tower. A separate framed photograph depicts the completed white wood-frame courthouse with a white picket fence and clock tower. Clock Tower History: The clock mechanism was imported from England and is an 8-day, manually wound instrument. It remains operational today, maintained by the Mariposa Public Works Department. Annotated Overlay Locations on Panorama: 1854 Courthouse: Located at the upper edge of town on Jones Street. Jones Street & Bullion Street: Upper residential and civic thoroughfares. Charles Street (Main Street): Primary commercial artery running through the center of the valley floor. Schlageter Hotel Site: Positioned along Main Street. Mariposa Creek: Flowing along the foreground basin of the town diggings. 4. The Fire of 1866: Mariposa's Second Great Conflagration Below is the complete transcript of the Mariposa Gazette report featured on the panel regarding the disaster of August 25, 1866 (following the earlier destructive fire of 1858): Article Text: "FIRE! MARIPOSA'S SECOND GREAT FIRE" A few minutes after 6 p.m. on Saturday, August 25, 1866 Mariposa was again ruined by a disastrous fire (first in 1858). According to the Gazette (the building was damaged but not destroyed), the fire was believed to have started when "a recently imported printer stepped inside the Free Press office and lighted a cigar. The match had evidently been dropped carelessly amongst the papers on the floor. The Free Press office was located near the corner of Main and 7th Streets and by ten minutes the fire had spread through two blocks. The fire crossed Main Street to the Odd Fellows building and the Methodist Church and soon the buildings on the block between 6th and 7th Streets were burning like so much chaff." Seven full blocks, except for four fire-proof buildings, were totally destroyed. "In one hour about 60 buildings and 77,000 worth of property were destroyed." By early Monday morning the men were clearing away debris and by press time the following Saturday, the Gazette reported that several temporary business structures had already been erected and were open for business. Inventory of Buildings Destroyed in the 1866 Fire: Residential & Civic: 14 Dwellings, 1 Church, 1 Odd Fellows and Masons Hall. Media & Printing: 1 Newspaper Office (Free Press), 1 Newspaper Depot. Hospitality & Retail: 3 Hotels, 5 Retail Stores, 1 Saddlery Shop, 9 Liquor Saloons (several equipped with billiard tables). Services & Trades: 2 Livery Stables, 3 Law Offices, 1 Drug Store, 3 Blacksmith Shops, 2 Carpenter Shops, 2 Shoemaker Shops, 1 Tailor Shop, 2 Butchering Establishments. Outbuildings: Numerous outhouses, private stables, and auxiliary structures. 5. Commercial Hotels & Lodging Gallison Hotel (1887 Advertisement) Location: Main Street, Mariposa (center of business district, opposite Odd Fellows' Hall). Proprietor: Winslow Gallison. Management: Mrs. Gallison individually superintended all internal departments of the hotel. Amenities: Newly furnished rooms, first-class table dining. Mariposa Hotel (1887 Card) Location: Corner of Main and Fifth Streets. Proprietor: Charles A. Schlageter. Target Market: Accommodated general travelers as well as Yosemite tourists on short notice. Amenities: Family rooms, well-lighted parlors, good table, and bath facilities. The Schlageter Hotel Date Built: Built in the 1850s. Architecture: Prominent two-story wooden structure featuring full upper and lower covered verandas. 6. Medical Artifacts & 19th-Century Therapeutics Old Mariposa Hospital A framed historical photograph depicts a two-story wood-frame hospital building with a prominent front porch and side wing (annotated "from Chic Allingham"). Dr. D. Jayne's Family Medicines (1880 Display Broadside) 1. Jayne's Specific for Tape-Worm Diagnosis: Describes tapeworm infections as widespread, noting that discharging white or yellowish segments ("resembling gourd seeds") is the only positive diagnostic proof. Pricing & Ordering: .00 per dose, shipped nationwide via mail from 242 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia. Usage Instructions: Dissolve powder in a pint of boiling water, drink in three equal hourly doses on an empty stomach. Follow with Cathartic medicines if bowels do not operate in three hours. 2. Dr. D. Jayne's Sanative Pills Formulation: Concentrated, sugar-coated pills. Sold in 50-pill boxes (-bash.25) or 15-pill specimen packets (-bash.10). Prescribed Ailments: Advertised for liver complaints, gout, jaundice, dyspepsia, rheumatism, kidney affections, fevers, nervousness, skin diseases, melancholy, sick headache, and costiveness (constipation). 3. Exhibit Commentary Note A small museum card mounted below the broadside reads: "A man advertises for 'a competent person to undertake the sale of a new medicine' and adds innocently 'It will prove profitable to the undertaker.'"
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Tao Dong retweeted
We're hiring an Engineering Manager for our AI developer tools frontend team: goo.gle/4xS84WR
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Claude has become a language, so I built a translator. English <-> Claudish
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Training a model via talking to my phone 🙂
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Spreadsheet is fulfilling its original promise as an end-user programming tool, with a little help from the AI.
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I found it often hard to understand what my coding agent was trying to explain. And in this particular case, it’s Grok 4.6 in Cursor. What’s the best way to improve the technical communication skill of a coding agent?
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Cursor’s remote agent actually offers even better UX.
I found Remote Control the best feature in Codex. Is there a comparable feature in other coding agents?
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I found Remote Control the best feature in Codex. Is there a comparable feature in other coding agents?
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Been using this internally. It’s a good model. Congrats to the team on the launch!
Introducing Gemini 3.7 Flash : ) - it is fast! - 50% lower price than 3.6 flash (through end of year) - strong intelligence increase in only ~3 weeks (thanks to some awesome algorithmic improvements) - available in the API, AI Studio, Antigravity, and more!
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Is there a way to comment on specific parts of a plan in Codex? Both Cursor and Antigravity seem to offer a better UX on reviewing the agent's plans.
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Impressive!
Replying to @davidhaz
This wasn't possible until now. The tech literally didn't exist. html-in-canvas lets shaders read and redraw your real DOM in real time, while text stays selectable and links stay clickable. Everyone else has demos. This is a full library. A new dimension for the web. Literally.
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