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Jeff Dean: Google adds custom skill definitions for internal developer agents

Jeff Dean · Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AI · Y Combinator · Jul 30, 2026 · at 24:36

Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean describes how Google internally equips AI models to navigate proprietary tools without model fine-tuning.

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“Particularly in the internal Google development environment, we have skills so that the agents can know how to use lots of our internal tooling for coding, or for code reviews, or for, you know, measuring performance, or, you know, fetching log files, and those are just skills that you can add to make the base model more capable, even though it hasn't necessarily been trained on exactly the way that You know, Google internal, ah, engineers would fetch log files from our, you know, proprietary system”

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