A Google engineer named Justin Poehnelt went viral last week for a tweet that should embarrass everyone in Mountain View. Two months ago, he says, Google fired him for building the Google Workspace CLI, a command-line tool that hit #1 on Hacker News, racked up more than 25,000 GitHub stars, and pulled in thousands of real users in a matter of days. Two days before the company showed him the door, Google announced at its own Cloud Next conference that an official Workspace CLI was on the way.
Read that again. The man built the thing developers were begging for. Google’s response was to fire him and then ship its own version of his idea.
If you want to understand why a company that once defined the cutting edge now seems like a sleepy utility, this is the whole story in miniature.
What he actually built
Quick background for the non-nerds. A CLI, or command-line interface, is just a way to control software by typing commands instead of clicking around a screen. Poehnelt’s tool, gws, let you reach into Gmail, Drive, Calendar, and the rest of Google Workspace from the terminal. More importantly, it was built so that AI agents could do the same thing, with over 40 prebuilt “skills” an agent could call on its own.
These giant companies can coast on momentum for years.
The clever part: It didn’t ship with a fixed menu of commands. It read Google’s own published API directory at runtime and built itself on the fly. So the second Google adds a new capability, the tool already knows about it.
And here’s the part that matters for the “rogue employee” narrative people are pushing: This wasn’t some basement side project. Poehnelt spent nearly seven years at Google on the Workspace Developer Relations team. Building open-source tools on top of Google’s APIs is literally that team’s job. He wasn’t going around the company. He was doing the thing he was hired to do, and he did it better than anyone expected.
The official reason and the real one
So why fire him? The cover story is brand policy. The tool lived under Google’s googleworkspace GitHub account and wore Google’s logo and colors, which made it look like an official product when it technically wasn’t. Legal wanted to know who authorized that.
That’s a real concern, and to be fair to the suits, you can’t have employees slapping the corporate logo on unofficial software. There are liability questions. But a branding problem has an obvious fix that isn’t termination. You change the logo. You add a disclaimer. You move the repo. Companies issue “please update the README” requests a hundred times a day. Nobody loses their career over a color palette.
Poehnelt’s own read, in his own words, is more honest and more damning: “I think the cause was that Workspace and certain leaders (and projects) were afraid of being disrupted. But the fear wasn’t specific to my CLI, it was a broader fear in what agents meant for Workspace.”
There it is. The tool worked too well. It showed, in public, at millions of views, what an AI-agent future for Google Workspace could look like. Some product manager whose road map suddenly looked obsolete didn’t enjoy the spotlight. The man didn’t get fired for breaking a rule. He got fired for being right too early and too loudly.
The irony Google would rather you forget
Here’s the irony: Google exists because two grad students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, hacked together a search engine on Stanford’s network using the school’s resources, without anybody handing them a permission slip. The entire Silicon Valley story runs on exactly the kind of initiative Google just punished. How many startups began in a garage or dorm room?
The company that was built by people who shipped first and asked forgiveness later now fires the people who ship first and ask forgiveness later. It has become the bureaucracy its founders routed around.
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That’s the mark of stagnation: an immune system so twitchy it attacks its own healthy cells, ensuring the safest move inside your company is to build nothing and stay invisible. The stock price doesn’t know it yet, but deep down, you do: You’ve already lost.
This isn’t a one-off
Poehnelt wasn’t the only one to walk. Addy Osmani left around the same time. He’s the longtime Googler who first posted the tool to the world back in March, a guy with 14 years at the company and a real reputation in web development. Poehnelt now calls that post “the tweet that got me fired.”
Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, summed up the mood: “Google fired the guy that made the google workspace cli, because he made the google workspace cli.”
The people capable of building Google’s future increasingly have no reason to build it at Google. They can do it independently, keep the upside, and skip the legal interrogation about logo colors. Poehnelt is already off doing his own thing. The repo he built is still live. Google’s official version is still “coming.” Eventually.
These giant companies can coast on momentum for years. But the rot moves faster: In the small decisions, in the moment a company decides that the man who made something people love is a threat rather than an asset. You can’t buy that kind of initiative back once you have taught your best people that showing it gets them fired.
Google ain’t making more Larry Pages. It would do well to remember how, before it’s too late.
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