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Titus Winters
Senior principal scientist, Adobe
Built Google’s Abseil C++ libraries, led its readability program, and co-authored Software Engineering at Google.
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Real Alpha has cut 7 moments of Titus Winters (Senior principal scientist, Adobe) talking, from an interview on The Pragmatic Engineer published Oct 28, 2026.
What Titus Winters said
The Pragmatic Engineer · Software engineering at Google & CS education with Titus Winters
7 moments · 42 min
- 26:05
Use deterministic rewrites for large codebase changes
“AI tools are really, really good at generating open rewrite recipes, which is way cheaper on token consumption and way more accurate and much faster”
at 32:06 - 1:02:51
AI creates value by making harder work possible
“a lot of the value of AI is not in doing the same thing faster. It's doing a harder, more valuable thing”
at 1:10:01 - 1:30:46
Grade the process, not just the code
“Grade instead, what are the prompts that you used to get here? Also, what are the tests that you provided?”
at 1:31:05 - 1:11:38
CS curricula still teach for the software of the 1990s
“The average thing in the curriculum is exactly what was needed to build a database or an operating system in the 90s.”
at 1:12:50 - 43:03
Google used readability reviews to spread coding norms
“It was a huge, subtle, below-the-waterline information-sharing program.”
at 47:02 - 58:04
Layoffs impose hidden costs on morale and engineering time
“It is a huge hidden cost to all of that and it's really demotivating.”
at 59:53 - 22:04
Abseil packaged Google's cleaned-up C++ idioms
“And Abseil was basically, here is the layer of common C++ idiom. This is the vernacular that everything at Google is written out of.”
at 22:21
- 26:05
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