Google's stock is up 136% over the past year and Google Cloud posted 63% revenue growth last quarter, powered by Gemini. But coding agents, not benchmark scores or cloud margins, are now the product category that defines who leads in AI. Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex have become company-defining products. Google has no direct equivalent.
Google I/O kicks off Tuesday. The argument for Google is structural: Gemini already touches Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Chrome, and Google Slides, giving it billions of active users that Claude Code has to fight to reach. A native Gemini integration across those surfaces, generating a slide deck inside Google Slides instead of hijacking your desktop to build one, could deliver a comparable agentic experience without a standalone agent product. Whether Google frames it that way is the question worth watching.
Read the original for the sharper version of the counterargument: no matter how well Google's legacy products perform, the growth of coding super agents is not something any incumbent can safely ignore. The piece makes clear that Google's overall business health and its readiness for this specific shift are two different things, and Google I/O 2025 is where that gap either closes or widens.
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