How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna

There's a lot of talk about productivity gains through AI. There's this camp of people are like so overhyped, nothing's working, nobody's actually adopting this at scale. When you see a significant amount of games, we find engineering teams that are very, very AI forward are recording about eight to ten hours save. Per week. Whenever I hear a stat like this, I think an important element is this is the worst it will ever be. This is now the baseline. The truth is the value is changing every day. So you need to ride that wave along with it. There's a story I heard you share on a different podcast where there's an engineer who has Goose watch him. He'll be talking to a colleague on Slack or an email, and they'll be discussing some feature that they think is useful to implement. Now a few hours later he'll find that Goose has already tried to build that feature and open a PR for it on Git. What level of engineer is most benefiting from these tools? What's been surprising and really amazing. The non-technical people using AI agents and programming tools to build things, the people that are able to embrace it to optimize for their particular workday and their particular set of tasks are really showing the most impact from these. How do you think things will look in a couple years in terms of how engineers work? That's different from today. All these LLMs are sitting idle overnight and on weekends while humans aren't there. Like there's no need for that. They should be working all the time. They should be trying to build in anticipation of what we want. What's maybe the most counterintuitive lesson you've learned?

About building products or building teams. A lot of engineers think that code quality is important to building a successful product. The two have nothing to do with each other. Today my guest is Donji Prasana. Donji's chief technology officer at Block, where he oversees a team of over thirty five hundred people. With Donji's leadership, Block has become one of the most AI native large companies in the world. And it's basically achieved what many Enj and product leaders are trying to achieve within their companies.

In our conversation, we chat about their internal open source agent called Goose. That by their measure is saving employees on average eight to ten hours a week of work time, and that number is going up. How AI specifically making their teams more productive and the teams that are benefiting most? Interestingly it's not the engineering team. What it took to shift the culture to be very AI oriented.

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