In this episode of The New Stack Podcast, hosts Alex Williams and Frederic Lardinois spoke with Keith Ballinger, Vice President and General Manager of Google Cloud Platform Developer Experience (GPC), about the evolution of agentic coding tools and the future of programming. Ballinger, a hands-on executive who still codes, discussed Gemini CLI, Google’s response to tools like Claude Code, and his broader philosophy on how developers should work with AI. He emphasized that these tools are in their “first inning” and that developers must “slow down to speed up” by writing clear guides, focusing on architecture, and documenting intent—treating AI as a collaborative coworker rather than a one-shot solution. 

Ballinger reflected on his early AI experiences, from Copilot at GitHub to modern agentic systems that automate tool use. He also explored the resurgence of the command line as an AI interface and predicted that programming will increasingly shift from writing code to expressing intent. Ultimately, he envisions a future where great programmers are great writers, focusing on clarity, problem decomposition, and design rather than syntax. 

Learn more from The New Stack about the latest in Google AI development: 

Why PyTorch Gets All the Love 

Lightning AI Brings a PyTorch Copilot to Its Development Environment 

Ray Comes to the PyTorch Foundation 

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