Google Announced an AI Tool. The Engineer Who Built It First Was Already Gone.

He got 28,000 stars on GitHub. Two months later, Google let him go. Justin spent seven years at Google building developer tools. The one that made him famous: a CLI that translated Google Workspace's entire API (Gmail, Calendar, Drive) into commands an AI agent could call directly. Instead of sitting outside making suggestions, the AI could walk into the office and actually do things. The tool hit number one on Hacker News. Multiple directors at Google came to him asking how he built it. The Cloud AI director publicly recommended it. Then Legal asked: did this tool go through internal brand approval before launch? It hadn't. Two months later, Justin was let go. That same week, Google announced at their annual developer conference: an official Workspace CLI is coming, built for AI agents. The same week, software engineer Nick Hsu, based in Taiwan and formerly of Xiaohongshu, explained on a podcast how he now interviews candidates. First question: "Do you have Claude Code installed, or something similar?" No? The interview ends there. If yes, he drops a scenario: a high-traffic voting system, or an order-matching engine, and says nothing. The candidate's job: ask him questions, pin down the requirements, open their AI tools, and build it live on screen. He calls this Live Building, not Live Coding. Most people, he says, get stuck in the same place: they can't ask good questions to begin with. The ones who pass treat the requirements like a spec, listing them out for the AI, asking the AI what they might have missed, then opening a second agent to cross-check the output. With the same tools available to everyone, fewer than 1% of candidates make it through. Two stories. One week. Justin could define problems and verify outputs. His tool was months ahead of Google's own roadmap. Nick tests exactly those two things: can you articulate what you need, and can you check whether the AI actually got it right? The core requirement is the same. Justin was inside an organization still running on old rules; no space had been made for that skill, and he paid for it. Nick has already rewritten the rules himself, and put them in the first question he asks every candidate. Both situations exist right now. The interview starts. The screen goes up. Nick doesn't say a word.