> (and if it's tooling, why can't that type of tooling be replicated for other codebases outside of google?) The elegance of the tooling from what I hear is th

> (and if it's tooling, why can't that type of tooling be replicated for other codebases outside of google?) The elegance of the tooling from what I hear is that there's tons of different tools maintained by different teams that work seamlessly (and fast) together to produce google3 and all of its supporting pieces. But to answer your question, sure it can. But good luck building your own. Google has been doing this since the 2000s. And if you're a big company already, you've already bought into your existing patterns & design choices; things like that are VERY hard to change.