> Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports. [...] Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.
Oof. So not only are they giving their remaining managers more reports, but those managers will be expected to do lots of other, non-management work.
Sure, nothing can go wrong there... Even if they didn't have non-managerial work to do, 15+ direct reports is just too many. They're not going to get to spend enough time meeting each report's needs, not a chance.
I think as layoffs emails go, it's a pretty good one (as the current top comment points out[0]), but boy, I would not want to be working at a company like what Coinbase is turning into. Non-technical teams shipping code to prod? No thanks. "AI-native pods"? No thanks. I do like the idea of one-person teams; I was at my most productive when I was in that kind of role (though I'm not sure my experience generalizes). I get that companies are still struggling to figure out how to adapt to LLMs, but... damn.
Pretty solid severance package for the folks being laid off, though.
Or maybe we should go back to what it was before Google and big $$$ tech decided that if you were a "manager" you shouldn't contribute technically.
Being a manager now means a bunch of busy work talking to other managers and weekly 1:1s. There is a ton that has been written about the managerial class. Producing nothing, but for sure making themselves look self-important.
Before that the manager was essentially the best engineer in the team (or the one that wanted to get promoted). Being a manger meant you were respected directly for your skills and you were expected to still be a full time contributor. Directors meant you were one of the best ICs out there.
Now, being a manager or a director means you sometimes did an MBA in an unrelated field. This brought a ton of politics, nonsense meetings (because the most visible output for managers is more meetings where they can posture).
Let's go back to what it used to be. We don't need weekly 1:1s to check on feelings. We don't need a full layer of managers syncing with each others and taking political decisions that will mainly advance them. We don't need another layer of gatekeepers.
I'm not saying all managers are bad, but this charade has been pushed a bit too far.
As a manager that does weekly 1:1s, I agree with that statement. But I do need 1:1s to check on progress, uncover blockers that people haven’t surfaced on their own, make continuous small decisions, offer support, assess performance, collect status information for my manager, and last but not least give employees the opportunity to share feelings frequently. They do, and it’s not very often, but it’s important to have a dedicated place for it otherwise devs often don’t share until damage is being done.
I’ve also watched devs who didn’t have weekly check-ins go pretty far off the rails. One dev I remember would go off by himself for weeks designing clever code and over-engineering things that weren’t needed. I thought to myself that someone should be checking in with him, and then months later I got stuck doing overtime before a delivery deadline with dozens of other devs on a weekend chasing an intermittent release-only runtime crash that turns out he caused by trying to get tricky with copy constructors. A quick 1:1 could have prevented this bug that ended up costing tens or hundreds of thousands before it ever happened.
BTW, the best managers I’ve ever had were technical contributors, and they tended to be more relaxed about check-ins than the non-technical managers, in part because they had a better sense of where things sat. Personally I also feel like a better manager when I’m contributing technically to a project, and devs seem to respect that more.
The best manager I had in my career was a guy with zero software dev experience. Technical skills and leadership are simply different fields. Converting a best engineer into a mediocre manager doesn't sound like a solution for anything.
As a data point, I work at a US company that ended up in this place and the same thing is happening.
In my BU there were directors with 2 direct reports. Even at the next level up, the number of non-IC directs is only high single digits. There are many managers who were already engaging technically with the product (not PRs but playing an active role in planning work) and they have no idea what directors are actually doing...aside from attending meetings with other directors.
Almost all decision-making capacity has been moved outside of teams which has resulted in almost no actual work (because everything needs to be cleared by someone with no engagement with product) and people leaving (because promo decisions are made by people who have no idea what anyone is contributing, the worst ICs are the only ones they can retain ofc).
It is a terrible environment to work in.
I don't necessarily think the manager should be best IC but definitely someone who is genuinely talented with sufficient scope and responsibility to make good decisions/add value for ICs. There are way too many passengers today.
Also, this is true of higher-level ICs. At my work, they have no real engagement with product so have influence through ambiguous statements about the general direction that get passed around like the word of God. None of these decisions, so far, have been helpful or relevant.
>> Producing nothing, but for sure making themselves look self-important.
A good manager is worth their worth in gold even if they produce zero technical output. I've had managers that were absolutely instrumental in my career as a programmer, and they did close to zero IC work.
>>Before that the manager was essentially the best engineer in the tea
Yes, and it was absolutely awful. Keep the best engineer in the team as the best engineer on the team. Call them experts, distinguished, senior++, whatever, don't make them managers.
>>Let's go back to what it used to be
God, please don't.
>>We don't need weekly 1:1s to check on feelings.
Speak for yourself please. I find weekly 1:1 extremely important for the entire team, especially in fully remote roles.
You people (as in this HN community) have your conception of middle management taken from memes, comics and to some extent a lack of experience. Managing even 5-10 people means juggling projects, personnel management, being held accountable for all actions of your people, having to be sandwiched between the pie-in-the-sky class and the myopic individual, translator in between. It means jumping on outage calls, doing architecture reviews, and getting slammed with meetings.
Please tell me where these 'managers make a lot of money and do nothing but approve timesheets' companies are, I'd kill to work for one!
Crazy jeremiad here. This never existed as a norm across the industry outside pockets like Bell Labs. Office Space was not a film about Google's pioneering new management philosophy.
Hard agree. One-on-ones are one of the silliest fads in our industry lately. Why would you wait until a weekly scheduled meeting to bring something up? Your manager's job is to be available to you when you need something, not just once a week. And if they want to know how you're feeling.. they should ask, putting it on an agenda feels very disingenuous.
Me and my direct manager (a C-level) tried weekly 1:1s for a full year and ended up giving up on it because it was clearly unproductive cargo-culting.
I unironically want that to be me. Check in, make sure the team is 'well fed,' increase my team's survivability by talking with other teams and advocating for mine. Then I go home at the end of the day, take the kids to school, whatever... I don't really want to ever touch a line of code again either physically or by proxy (Claude code), yet I respect the hell out of engineers and want to fall on swords for them. Where does that leave me?
This jumped out at me right away too. What happened to the days when a dedicated manager would manage 8 reports? What now? AI is going to double the communication bandwidth with these reports and further double the free time they have?
I do think the most efficient form of team is a "cell" of three people. One is a little unstable.
> What happened to the days when a dedicated manager would manage 8 reports?
Cheap money went away which caused companies to start asking hard questions about productivity and how much those dedicated managers were contributing.
Its because when something is illogical, these "brains" retort to using some kind of a streched out metaphor which dumbs it down and makes it make sense, to them at least. So they invent the stupidities like treating a team as a Navy-SEAL unit or a sports team or... coming up with something like "player-coach"...
In most sports you've retired by the age of 40 and most coaches are older than that. I would say that's the reason it's common in sports, but that's the exception not the rule
I was a manager of 12 for several months and that was really difficult. I got a severe burnout, even though I had no IC responsibilities. I cannot imagine how could I dedicate enough time to my team if I did.
Earlier in my career I was a manager of a team of 12 direct reports (non-tech white-collar industry) and it wasn't that difficult to do on top of my normal workload.
Of course, as a manager my normal workload was reduced to account for the managerial tasks, because that's what most industries outside of tech do.
A 30 min 1-1 per week per report would be a full working day. Never mind that if you're an IC then you'll also be expected to support other people using your code, as well as analysing and approving decisions for your reports.
It might be better to have 45 minutes every 2 weeks with reports, which is 1.5 days every 2 weeks. Then probably another 2 days every two weeks for sideways and upwards meetings, 2 days for ad hoc planning and design work, and 4 days for coding and reviewing.
30 minutes of chat is one thing but one might expect work to come out of it such as things you have to do for or about that person.
IMO it's just efficient to use any excuse to say "what's up, how did the house move go?" or whatever and make sure that you do that with everyone and that you behave in such a way that they don't fear or hate to have a 5 minute chat and know you are ready to listen if they want to say more. i.e. to take an actual interest in each person.
I think the point is to push people out primarily.
This gives them a narrative for doing that by asking for something which isn't doable. Then middle management applies the expectation unevenly to people below them based off of political favor.
lol I read "as many as 15+ direct reports" and thought it was hilariously low. My manager at google had like 50+ directs in 2010. And he was the best boss I've ever had.
Popular conception of what a manager is is wildly unambitious.
Weekly 1:1 is performative and useless. It's not what makes a good manager. What makes a good manager is:
* Having excellent domain knowledge and judgement
* Having the respect of the team, to settle disputes
* Solving problems when needed
* Hiring and retaining an excellent team
* Picking the right things to work on
... etc ...
If a manager is doing these things well I don't need a standing meeting at all. Or we can meet quarterly to check in.
Interesting. I'd define all of those tasks as the job of a team/tech lead, rather than a manager. I've worked at places where the same person did both roles, and it was not always a great mix.
Median tenure at a lot of tech companies is around 18 months. If you meet quarterly with your manager, the median employee is only going to meet with their manager 6 times, total! Not to mention people change jobs, and org charts change, so even if you don't leave after 18 months your manager might. How can you build a real relationship with only 6 meetings total?
This is stupid and irrational. It's like seeing someone eat 100 cakes, and then assuming everyone can do it. And then getting diabetes afterwards.
It seems quite counterproductive to assume such a system would scale to everyone else, or that everyone else could possibly implement this. This is cowboy levels of human resource management, not careful engineering.
I do think that if LLMs are the equivalent of more employees, then you'd expect people to do more managerial work and less individual contribution. Certainly, that's what I see in my day-to-day.
When your job becomes managing a fleet of agents, with all the design, planning, coordination, supervision and evaluation that requires, is that "individual contribution" or "managerial work"?
If everything is high prio nothing is and if the backlog is always full it's not a problem if it fills up even more. If I am at the assembly line, I am doing my darnedest not to make it run faster. One can only sprint so long.
I'll probably get some flack for this, but this is about as good of a layoff email as he could have sent.
* explains the reasons (financials, AI enablement)
* talks about what folks who are leaving get in detail (first) and thanks them
* talks to the folks who are staying
Layoffs are hard, no doubt, and I am not sure he's making the right choice. I see plenty of doubt about some of the actions in other comments that echoes mine. I certainly wouldn't want to have 15 direct reports and also ship production code regularly. But as CEO, it's his job to make these kinds of choices.
The proof is in the pudding as they say. We'll see how Coinbase does with this new orientation in the next year or so and that will determine if this was a wise or foolish move. Is there a flood of talent leaving? Major breaches? Business as usual with better than expected profits?
This email was 100% AI generated. I just edited a similar sentence from a claude code doc I'm writing - "we're not just X, we're fundamentally Y" is an obvious tell. I guess he's putting his money where his mouth is
> To get there, we are not just reducing headcount and cutting costs, we’re fundamentally changing how we operate: rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it.
I think a lot of LLMs are trained on corporate communications, and since companies have been copying each other for years, it’s hard to tell them apart.
I assume blaming AI is a way to soften the blow even if its not really a reason, it sounds hip and attractive to investors who want to hear that sort of thing.
> this is about as good of a layoff email as he could have sent.
Except for that tone-deaf part at the end, where right after he talks to the people who "will be leaving" (that is, the people getting kicked out), he says that Coinbase will be stronger and healthier for this. Which makes it hard not to draw the conclusion that the people "leaving" are part of the unhealth.
The CEO probably does not even think that, and just wants to reduce costs. But from what was written, the implications are decidecly suboptimal.
Is this code for "we're firing all the old people"? As I understand it, I can say I'll only hire proficient English speakers (a "bona fide occupational requirement"), but I can't say I'll only hire native speakers, as that would discriminate against various protected groups. This seems like the same thing—proficiency may be a bona fide requirement, but expecting they learned this year's workflow first is age discrimination.
I don't expect ethical conduct from crypto companies and will not be sad if they are sued into oblivion.
Exactly, I think there's actually an advantage to using these tools with a few decades hands on experience. At least, I'm getting satisfactory results and I frequently lean on my experience to prevent AI tools derailing. But it's actually a lot of work as well. More or less a full time job at this point.
Age-ism is reinforced by senior people resisting the notion that they need to change and adapt. I'm not like that (I'm 51). But I'm having a lot of tedious debates with people lately about how they don't want to use AI tools, how their job is somehow special so they can't use it, etc. Many of those people are actually quite a bit younger than me. There definitely is a pattern here of people that are a bit set in their ways not adapting and being a bit stubborn. Age-ism is unfair to people that are actually putting in the work to learn and adapt. But life is unfair.
Nobody actually has more than 6-12 months of experience with agentic coding tools at this point because the tools were pretty much unusable before then. I was using ChatGPT and a few other tools before that for occasionally copy pasting bits of code or figuring out bugs. But that's not really the same thing.
Half a year is not a huge gap to bridge if for whatever reason you are a bit behind on this. So, get on with it. It should not take you that long to catch up. Especially if you are a bit older, the best way to counter age-ism is showing that you have all the skills already.
Same, I've been coding for 40+ years, and other people I know of similar length of time also seem real quick to adopt AI. I'm constantly having to show the young devs how to get the most out of their AI agents and also adapting my workflows regularly as things changes. Weirdly its some of the youngest who are most resistant, I think because they are learning coding skills, and just have got the hang of coding such that they are productive, and AI is coming in and taking that away from them largely, they are still keen to code. While I've enjoyed coding, realistically it's always been the bottleneck in creating software. A lot of the process is about how to effectively manage that bottle neck, now a lot more options are available. Iterating quick, trying different things, experimenting. Much easier to throw something away when you have better ideas.
> I am among the oldest on our team and also the most in tune with AI.
Congratulations. But you completely missed my point. I didn't say old people can't be in tune with AI.
> I see AI-native as those who have embraced it
That's not what the word "native" means. In the human language situation I referred to, it's about the language you learned first. It's not a synonym of proficient or fluent. If you learned to code first without AI tools, you are not AI-native by any definition I would understand, no matter how good at using AI you may be.
It's not just "English-native" that makes me think they have this meaning in mind. It's also the term "digital native" that gets thrown around a lot and is absolutely about how old you are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_native
Except people who are learning to leverage it appropriately already know better than to generate important production code by "managing fleets of agents".
"There's nothing about being a non-native English speaker that prevents you from being proficient." This is the comment's point. We're talking about proxies and correlations here, not physical law.
Hold up, even before discussing the word "native", there's a weird logical-disconnect between the above two comments. I think paraphrasing is the simplest way to illustrate:
{1} scottlamb: "I suspect their lofty stated goal of X is a lie, to disguise their true goal of Y, which is something common which companies find much easier and more-desirable."
{2} CityOfThrowaway: "You are wrong, because it's obvious that X is achievable... if you define 'native' in a certain way."
{3} Terr_: "Uh, what? That doesn't make sense. The feasibility of X isn't part of Scottlamb's argument. Even if we assume X is possible, it isn't evidence they actually intend X over Y.
I think unethical and illegal activity is par for the course in most realms of American business. And I would replace “sued into oblivion” with mandatory arbitration and “appropriate settlement”.
Everybody had a chance to learn it those year. No one who had already learned to code had a chance to learn it first, as in before other ways of coding. Not everyone can be AI-native.
You might assume they aren't going to be so stupid as to try to exclude everyone who isn't new to programming. I wouldn't. They're a crypto business.
I worked for Coinbase. Brian won't even speak more to this to the company. He led by twitter post. I was there for 4 years (thanks to a great manager) but Brian was one of the worst leaders I've ever experienced.
This is (unironically) what big institutional allocators love to hear. They've been sold the idea that almost every medium-very big tech corp is vastly overstaffed and can become a monster cash cow and stop SBC dilution by cutting headcount + becoming A.I first.
They hear this from the sellside, from activists, from the guys managing their private market allocations etc.
My company is doing this too. Our marketing team can use cursor web agents to make coding changes to the marketing website/blog/landing pages. The agents make the code change and make PRs in github where our tech team reviews it before merging. The marketing team is almost entirely non-technical.
I'm sure a lot of companies are doing that as described (mine too), but I have never in my life heard someone classify website/blog/landing page changes as "production code".
I have non-technical people vibe coding internal tooling that the engineering team simply hasn't had time to get to [1]. It's been a big help internally. Maintenance isn't an issue because the effort to create it was so low, they'd just throw it away and create it again if necessary.
[1] Of course permissions are such that the tools can't do anything that would damage any of the systems.
this is the worst. Dario pilled in all the wrong levels. but that is a crypto company no wonder they ride the worst ideas to get rich asap. ICOs and NFTs are the closest thing to what we re living right now when they say they solved coding
Companies with less than 20 employees aren't federally required to offer COBRA. Companies larger than that are required to offer at least 18 months of coverage. I don't know how large your old company was, but Coinbase is large enough that this offer, rather than being generous, sounds illegal? https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ebsa/about-ebsa/our-a...
> COBRA is the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act. It gives workers and their families who lose their health benefits the right to choose to continue group health benefits provided by their group health plan for limited periods of time under certain circumstances such as voluntary or involuntary job loss, reduction in the hours worked, transition between jobs, death, divorce, and other life events. [0]
Thanks. It’s wild to see people here express this as “generosity” when they are just covering a few months of what is in every developed nation considered absolute baseline, for life, regardless of employment status.
This is surprising about COBRA - I thought it’s always 18 months. Moreover it doesn’t make much sense to limit cobra - you are paying full price out of pocket anyway.
The reality is that Coinbase earns on trading volume, and since we are in a crypto bear market, revenue is down. So they have to cut to keep the company profitable (or in line with what the investors expect).
While AI is likely a productivity boost, the underlying reason is not AI.
Yes, I'm not buying this story about layoffs due to AI. It's a convenient excuse, which these companies seem to be getting away with too.
And something else I don't get about these AI related layoff announcements: if AI was a productivity boost wouldn't you hire more engineers and technical staff to capture the value? Or else you're basically saying "we're a tech company that has no idea what to do with more super-engineers".
There are diminishing returns to more engineers. Also hiring more is like investing with leverage. You might increase EV but also increase the chance of going bust if things go poorly.
The layoffs being "due to AI" is usually about freeing up the budget to build a couple datacenters and buy GPUs. And they have to layoff 14% of their workforce because they are buying those GPUs at many times the normal price thanks to the zeitgeist.
They aren't saying that they don't know what to do with the AI productivity boost, but rather they think it worth taking a huge productivity hit right now so they can invest in the future. Whether their vision of the future is realistic...
Reading only the parts of the post that are not about AI does not instill the sense that Mr Armstrong is the kind of person who would hesitate to say that people are let go because the company wants/needs to save money.
Indeed. COIN releases earnings on May 7 in the evening. Q4 2025 was the first quarter where they had a negative EPS in the past couple years. Most analyst estimates for Q1 2026 are trending downward. This "difficult decision" seems to be all about getting in front of a bad earnings release.
Yeah AI is the perfect scapegoat for layoffs recently to soften the impact on stock price and investor confidence. Coinbase is obviously doing layoffs because they are strongly tethered to a stock market that is rattled by political conflict and economic uncertainty.
Honest question: On what basis do people even trade crypto? Like, how would one even decide when to buy and when to sell? Is it just based on looking at the charts? Are there any "fundamentals" (like there are for actual companies) that can be used to make investment decisions? From an outsider's point of view, the whole thing looks like a casino where people bet on random price movements on underlying assets that have no actual value.
They're so tied to crypto that i'm surprised they haven't been tempted to diversify into other asset classes, or even yolo into prediction markets like robinhood did.
I was logged in when I read your comment, so I flicked over to the tab to see what they have. There is a whole "Predict" section of the site I'd not looked at before with sports betting, elections, commodities etc.
Very curious why they haven’t diversified into real world assets. It seems like an obvious move, even if the margins would be lower than their fee business (~85% margins!!).
They’ve added tokens and altcoins to the platform, but I don’t think that’s a particularly strong long-term bet.
Publicly traded companies get their stock price punished if they just announce layoffs, whereas if they say it is because of AI, they do not see the same treatment.
If you look at Coinbase in 2020 they had roughly 1,200 employees.
By 2022 they had roughly 4,500 employees.
They over hired and now they are pairing back, this is all it is.
That seems to be the case with a lot of companies with a significant number of tech workers... I think every tech manager/leader needs to read The Mythical Man Month and pass a test on the content without benefit of AI. I know Twitter/X was lambasted when Musk took ownership and made deep cuts, but my own opinion is it was probably for the best and would be healthier as a company after.
I mean, I want to work... and I absolutely despise the push to keep dev wages down, even at higher levels. But the reality is, at least from my own experience, that most software orgs and projects are actually over-staffed and would operate better with fewer, more experienced staff. Rather than filling hundreds of butts in seats.
That's exactly right. Bad leadership got them here. Of course they won't suffer, but their employees will. But only because they announced it as AI related. So the investors don't care.
> Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks.
No, you didn't. You watched engineers use AI to ship in days something that looks like what used to take a team weeks. After enough rounds of feature evolution, you'll realise that what they actually shipped isn't at all the same. Anthropic's C compiler, which also seemed like a good start that would have taken people much longer to deliver, ended up being impossible to turn into something actually workable.
In a year or so, software developed by "AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact" - which is another way of saying people who ship code they don't understand and therefore haven't fixed the architectural mistakes the agents make - will become impossible to evolve, and then things will get very interesting.
AI can help software developers in many ways, but not like that.
AI definitely leads to some productivity gain but the claims of 10x, 100x, 1000+x are (for now) irrational exuberance. Churning out prototype software has always been quick, and now it's blazing. But these LLMs are like Happy Gilmore. They get to the green in one shot then they orbit the hole with an extremely dubious short game. The virtue is in their parallelizability but you still need to review their work, lest you come back to it wrestling an alligator while a ruined TV tower husk sends spark showers over the pin.
As a software engineer who also hires other software engineers, I’m curious about the disconnect in our experiences.
I do systems programming. Before AI feature development roughly went like, design, implement, test, review with some back edges and a lot of time spent in test and review.
AI has made the implementation part much faster, at the cost of even more time spent testing and reviewing, though still an improvement overall.
We do not see the weeks to days improvement though. The bottleneck before was testing and reviewing, and they are even bigger bottlenecks now.
What kind of work do you do, and what kind of workflow were you using before and after AI to benefit so much?
The only way you could possibly know that is if you're reviewing the code, which means you're not "managing fleets of agents". If you're not reviewing the code (and you wouldn't be if you're managing fleets of agents), then you have no way to tell what you're shipping.
Can you link to a changelog that shows the 5-10x feature increases? I keep hearing this, but I don’t see anything I use ever actually shipping like this, or people backing this up with any sort of proof.
I have an example in my line of work. Full service rewrite in a new language. Would have taken forever without AI. AI makes it easier, faster. The service has better throughput, uses less machines. Having a complete full test harness that allows us to ensure we are meeting all the functionality of the previous service is key. AND we are keeping the old service on standby because we know we don't know what might be wrong with the new one.
What you are shipping is not the same as what Coinbase is shipping. These are vastly different things. Making a shiny app with AI is great, I'm doing it as I type this. But I am under no delusion that what I make can sustain a multi-million dollar or even billion dollar business in the case of Coinbase. That's plain silly.
Yeah absolutely embarassing take. If I had a nickle for every time someone sent me some AI garbage that was supposedly "thoroughly vetted and cross checked agent output", I'd be at least a thousandaire (gotta keep it real).
There are strengths, but if you think its writing stream of code and just using it as is, I would LOVE to compete against you.
This bothered me some months ago, so I began posting all the non-sensitive LLM sessions I made online. That way when someone makes an assertion I can present evidence.
I commented this yesterday, I’ll repeat it again - what do you guys think organizations that have heavily leaned into AI are shipping nowadays?
Most devs aren’t working on cutting edge, low level, mission critical systems. AI is great for that. Every company I personally know have been fast shipping features that are being used daily by millions of people for the past 7 months.
We have the same thing on my team, and we also understand the limitations of AI generated code. If you’re more or less experienced, you can easily see the “good” and “bad” sides of it. So you kinda plan it out in a way that you can “evolve AI generated software”. I wouldn’t say the same thing in 2025 January, but it’s much different times now. Things are already working.
> If you’re more or less experienced, you can easily see the “good” and “bad” sides of it. So you kinda plan it out in a way that you can “evolve AI generated software”.
If you're truly "managing fleets of agents" there's no way you're able to sift through the good and the bad in the output. If your AI-generated code is evolvable (which is hard to tell right now) then you're not writing it with "fleets of agents". If you are writing it with fleets of agents, I would bet it's not evolvable; you just haven't reached the breaking point yet.
Most of the people making this argument vastly overestimate the quality of engineering and discipline that behind the software powering most corporations. CRUD apps are likely to be the most prominent type of application across industries, and most of them are crud
I have literally built and shipped multiple things that would have taken me many many months to do and I’ve done it in under a week.
Many of these are LLM heavy features where the LLM can literally self-evaluate and self-optimize. I start with a general feature, it will generate adverse, synthetic data, it will build a feature, optimize it the figure out new places to improve. 1 year ago, this would have taken an entire team months to do, now, it’s 2 or 3 days of work.
The C compiler was a prime example of an application where the LLM can self-evaluate/optimise, with one of the best set of tests could imagine. Yet the end result was a mess.
I have experienced areas where high productivity can be had without much loss in quality. So I can believe it. But it really depends on what you’re doing and I firmly believe many companies will run out of easy stuff that we can blaze through with AI fairly quickly. At least that’s where we seem to be heading
Early in my career, people said this about programmers who (weakly) insisted on using assemblers.
Then, about people using high-level languages like C.
Then, about people using C++.
Then, about people using "toy"/"scripting" languages like PHP and Python.
About people who use ORMs instead of writing SQL directly.
About people who use JavaScript ("not a real programming language" was the dis).
People used to argue how it was the mark of a tourist to use anything more visual than Emacs.
This slight won't stick, nobody cares, and it might end up sounding stupid later. You can't usefully insult a professional engineer in 2026 by pointing out that they haven't memorized ASCII or the Arm instruction set.
Look at the best models from Spring 2025, and compare with now (and similarly for Springs 2024 and 2025). Armstrong and lots of others are betting that this trend will continue, and if it does, the LLMs will ship code the LLMs understand, and whether any human specifically understands any particular part will mostly not matter.
> the LLMs will ship code the LLMs understand, and whether any human specifically understands any particular part will mostly not matter.
I find this particularly funny. There were more than a couple Star Trek Episodes where some alien planet depends on some advanced AI or other technology that they no longer understand, and it turns out the AI is actually slowly killing them, making them sterile, etc. (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Bough_Breaks_(Star_Tr... )
Sure, Star Trek is fiction, but "humans rely on a technology that they forget how to make" is a pretty recurrent theme in human history. The FOGBANK saga was pretty recent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank
It just amazes me that people think "Sure, this AI generated code is kinda broken now, but all we need is just more AI code to fix it at some unknowable point in the future because humans won't be able to understand it!"
And if the trend doesn't continue? I understand that a company with Coinbase's performance has little to lose and not many options, but many companies are in a better position.
The problem is that executives could take the 15-20% productivity boost and be content, but they read stuff like this, get greedy, and they don't understand the risk they're taking.
> - No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.
Geeks who didn't even stand near professional sports should really shut up about anything sport related, lol.
I would really like to see professional, established coach running around with young prodigies on a peak of their biology.
> - AI-native pods: We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact. We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.
And AI clowns will cheer and applaud this, not seeing that they're now doing the job of 5(!) people with the same salary. Why is nobody talking about this?
Also, I find it really bizarre that those neo feudal lords see their companies as just a life stock to count. They don't even count people, just see them as numbers to reduce/scale up. Modern tsardom, but instead of being tied via official decree you're now tied by your lifestyle and family.
"Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make"
> Geeks who didn't even stand near professional sports should really shut up about anything sport related, lol. I would really like to see professional, established coach running around with young prodigies on a peak of their biology.
Player-coach used to be a thing in professional sports a long, long time ago. There's a reason you don't have it anymore. A coach can't be expected to take the long-term view while also expecting to contribute. Most examples were players near the end of their career and they didn't tend to do very well.
The only place you see it is in fun adult leagues. Perhaps the message then is that Coinbase wants to be less professional and more amateur-like?
Your comment reminded me that this still happens in the NBA. At 43 years old, Udonis Haslem seldom played minutes towards the end of his 20 year career with the Heat. But they kept him on as a “player-coach,” in that he was a mentor to the younger players and assisted in their coaching. Kyle Lowry is another current example of this “player-coach” role, currently on the Sixers.
Reminds me of how kings used to (I think, I'm bad at history) actually fight the battles themselves. Now the head of state, the head of government and the other top people don't fight themselves. Even the admirals only plan and command, AFAIK.
The only successful Player-Coach that comes to mind was Eric Cantona as player-manager of the France national beach soccer team after leaving Manchester United aged 30.
He won the 2004 Euro Championship, the 2005 FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup along with a number of top 4 places over his 15 years as player and/or coach.
I'm not sure the professional sports analogies carry over very well.
With very rare exceptions, professional athletes are just not as good athletically at 40/50 as they were at 20. They may be smarter in some ways--which maybe means they'd be better as coaches.
I'm not sure this carries over well to engineering unless you mean that the young people are willing to grind for a lot more hours on nights and weekends.
Not true. You often see it semi-pro soccer. Previously, you could see player coaches even in top-flight elite soccer.
There's a reason for this change. As players became elite and specialized by position, the budget for specialization expanded. At the top, teams could afford a distinct role for coaching focus. Since the stakes are really high (the difference between 1-3 points is measured in dozens of millions of dollars of impact due to relegation - a concept that is missing on most US elite sports) it follows specialization drive is sky-high at elite levels.
Thus, soccer player coaches have mostly dissappeared at elite level. But the role is alive and well in the semipro tier.
In roles where there's no binary, extreme outcome from specialization, like in semi pro soccer, or at an ENG role at a random company , it is only natural to have someone wear multiple hats and not specialize.
I think Netflix started the sports team analogy for their hiring (and firing). But they don't put forth a "you're a part of the Netflix family". They're open about the work culture you're going to be stepping into.
And I don't think they're trying this thing that Coinbase is trying either.
It’s funny when bunch of nerds try to mask the fact they have know idea what they’re doing by some lame allegory to sports, military, or some other discipline supposedly more manly and rugger than girly (yugh) math, logic and programming.
“We at the coding company LovelyBeeBunny should be like the samurai’s of the old, willing to pull our swords to die for emperor…” etc. And it is always riddled with complete misunderstanding of the analogous subject, whether sports, history, or warfare.
Let's be honest, this is a crypto exchange. "Line go up" is the only philosophy these people adhere to.
> Also, I find it really bizarre that those neo feudal lords see their companies as just a life stock to count. They don't even count people, just see them as numbers to reduce/scale up. Modern tsardom, but instead of being tied via official decree you're now tied by your lifestyle and family.
People don't work somewhere like Coinbase if they're concerned about morality or mitigating the harms done to society.
Even better, as an exchange, they don't even necessarily care whether the line goes up, down, sideways, or in fucking circles to quote the Wolf of Wall Street. As long as it goes somewhere, and customers are charged fees.
You have to look past literally everything their leadership is saying and at the heart of the matter: This is a dying company, and they physically will not have the capital to pay paychecks if they don't do this. Everything else is window dressing to try to keep investors on-board, but they aren't buying it, and neither should you.
The crypto market winter that started in Q4 last year led to Coinbase's ~worst quarter ever ($667M loss). Crypto has not recovered. Coinbase has done nothing to stem the outflows. That same quarter HOOD showed a net profit of $605M; and showed a $346M profit last week. COIN and HOOD are two very similar companies.
COIN's earnings are in two days. They preceded the earnings call with layoffs, which is always a bad sign. And HOOD's net income has dropped by like 40%, though they're still at least profitable. You should be prepared for COIN to announce a similar drop; except, COIN wasn't even profitable before. Its going to be a bloodbath.
The thing is that the former crypto gamblers have moved on to gamble in the prediction markets like Polymarket now. Not sure if COIN is coming back from this.
Almost every "AI washing", except for the firms that are spending massively on data center capex (Microsoft, Meta), is coming from a company that is hurting.
The macro is not great right now. The world economy is on a razor's edge. If things unwind, we could all be in for a world of economic hurt. There aren't many levers to pull us out this time around, either.
Crypto is in an even worse state. Investors want liquidity for the uncertainty. Plus there's the looming Q-day that keeps getting pushed earlier and earlier by the experts while we're also inching nearer and nearer on the clock.
"They don't even count people, just see them as numbers to reduce/scale up."
I'm remember of when I went out for drinks with a startup consultant friend and she mentioned one founder she spoke with refer to his staff as "biological units" when addressing use of proceeds to hire additional staff.
This is sickening. People that don't realise that companies are made of people are in for a surprise. Once they go public, they forget that, and it shows.
A company_is_ the sum of its people, their talents and aligned behind a mission statement.
This is so far misguided, I can't help but think this 'biological unit' of a founder won't last long.
"Neo feudal lords" might read like hyperbole to those unaware of Brian Armstrong's "Network State" fanaticism. He may not be one yet, but he's certainly striving toward that goal.
> I would really like to see professional, established coach running around with young prodigies on a peak of their biology.
This is a really strange nit. You are aware it's an analogy about skill and role. To reduce this to being about biology and the impacts of senescence on ability is weird, and doesn't really apply here.
Analogies have to make sense, to be applicable. In this case it doesn't.
E.g. you can't just spew nonsense like "let's work together like a bee hive, everything for the Queen/CEO, no matter the personal cost to an individual" without others pointing out the stupidity of comparing humans with bees.
You can't just come up with a desirable adjective and start coming up with random scenarios in which those characteristics may occur. "Let's make the company strong as a gorilla, big as an elephant, smart as Von Neumann, bright as a Sun, as courageous as young guys from youtube fails compilations." This makes no sense whatsoever.
Yeah my experience in engineering management: Very easy to be a "player coach" when the team was small, like when I had 4 direct reports. As soon as I had 9 (in an org with no TPM/product) my full time job was wearing 3 hats, and maybe 3 hours a week were spent on actual pure technical tasks (mostly scut work to unblock team members after-hours)
Can I push to production anytime I want? I can run 10000 agents then no problem. I'll just move fast and break things and I'll get massive cheers because its AI.
These people should leave and start their own companies: AI-native pods: We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact. We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.
> - AI-native pods: We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact. We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.
And then this person leaves, leaving no documentation or workflow. That's ok though, another ai agent will pick up right back and add slop on top of that until the codebase is a black box interacting with another black box.
Oh and this company handles other people's money? That's going to end well.
A major problem with player-coach is that it makes the manager compete with the IC. If we solve that it'd be more workable, if not it'd erode teams from the inside.
"Though primarily known as a dominant forward "Mr. Hockey" for the Detroit Red Wings, he came out of retirement in 1973 at age 45 to play with his sons and took on coaching responsibilities with Houston."[1]
[1] Gordie Howe, playing on the same NHL team as his two sons.
I mean it doesn't really help the analogy when most of the examples in the Wikipedia link mention how it's either not done anymore for that sport or very rare nowadays.
How many player-coaches have their actually been in any major pro sport in the last 20 years? Zero give or take? The last one I recall is Pete Rose and that was like 1985.
Crypto was always a clown show. Not saying everyone working the crypto/Web 3.0 was a clown just.. This tone-def message coming out of the waning crypto industry is nothing more than an eye-roll.
> Also, I find it really bizarre that those neo feudal lords see their companies as just a life stock to count. They don't even count people, just see them as numbers to reduce/scale up. Modern tsardom, but instead of being tied via official decree you're now tied by your lifestyle and family.
The CEO is looking at revenue and at costs. He can see what will happen if current burn rate isn’t reduced. Doesn’t it come (in part) to numbers, which must be reduced/scaled as needed? (Along with other costs)
I don't get it either. LLMs put the enshittification of software engineering into overdrive. The job is less fun (reviewing AI slop, sometimes even produced by entirely non-tech people like managers), the expectation of increased productivity, the expectation that we can now do the job of multiple people and salaries will decrease as well. I don't understand how so many software engineers I know cheer for this technology.
Do they not see that this will drastically change their lives for the worse? I'm in Europe, none of them has ever earned "fuck you" money.
> And AI clowns will cheer and applaud this, not seeing that they're now doing the job of 5(!) people with the same salary. Why is nobody talking about this?
The profit from the employee reduction goes to the capitalists not to labor. So it is in the best interest of workers to resist reductions in the number of workers.
delusions of having AI do those roles and the one person in charge over prompting will know the difference between quality and slop... guess which one I'm betting on?
>>> And AI clowns will cheer and applaud this, not seeing that they're now doing the job of 5(!) people with the same salary. Why is nobody talking about this?
I don't think anyone is applauding this. The only people applauding stuff like this are the CEO's of Anthropic (because that means more tokens/profit). Most other CEO's in big tech have toned down the rhetoric big-time.
The job of 5 people being done with the same salary is a function of the job market. It's an employers market now. So stuff like this happens. If you had an employee's market this wouldn't happen.
fwiw - and this is a separate topic. If health insurance were de-linked from employment most people would flee the job market on their own.
> We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.
Experimenting or cost-cutting? Are these one-person "teams" you g to be paid more for having multi-domain roles regardless of how fast AI can churn out pseudo-MVPs?
We're going to see this become a trend beyond Coinbase, IMO. The idea that companies just want employees to be more productive is a farce. The C-suite would prefer to make no profit, have few to no employees, and get personally richer in the process.
Many upper level managers seem to be blind to the fact that the kind of person who can actually excel as a "do it all" is most likely not the kind of person that wants to work in that kind of environment. Those people will do a year or two pulling down a salary while they are also spinning up a side project, and then they'll bolt as soon as they can. It sounds like a recipe for constant employee churn, leaving behind a wake of fragile code.
I'm only writing this because Devil's advocate and all, but what if you're actually capable of all those things?
Plenty of us here can conceive, design, architect, build, ship and own things from soup to nuts, and feel a lot more invested in the result as a consequence.
If the compensation is good, and it feels less shackled and less bureaucratic, is that necessarily a bad thing?
Well, yeah. As an employee in general one isn't that bothered about profit. As long as one's own job is safe and the jobs of the people one's close to.
BTC's price isn't the point. Crypto businesses are a shrinking niche (not counting cases like Binance, but those are exceptions), and VC money has moved on. Crypto had its shot but couldn't go mainstream. AI is a better bet now.
> No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.
What's the theory on this? It seems to be common conclusion, but I don't understand why AI changes the situation here.
I understand that AI means you can do more with fewer people. Fewer people means less coordination overhead and fewer managers and fewer layers. What I don't get is why you want your managers to be doing IC work more so with AI than before. I don't see why anything changes about needing roughly 1 first line manager for every 6-8 people, or why it would be more beneficial now that the managers have production programming responsibilities.
Both before and after AI it's important that managers have real technical knowledge of the codebase. Having managers do actual production IC work in my experience has been a bad allocation of resources, though, and I don't see why AI changes that.
(a) Someone has to do the management tasks. Why do we think that isn't a full time job anymore?
(b) When managers do production IC work, in my experience it increases the load on ICs in review, because the manager one would _expect_ to not be _as_ expert as pure ICs on the codebase, and yet they are perceived as "senior". ICs then have overhead in having to manage that power imbalance in review. I have known a few extremely productive manager/ICs… but the effect on their teams was not super great. It made the manager into something of a micromanager and the actual ICs lacked autonomy.
Getting rid of middle managers has been the game plan for every headcount reduction for the last 50 years. They always seem expendable until a few months later when senior managers get overwhelmed and staff get confused and they end up making the same org they just destroyed.
> - No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.
This is going to end poorly for them. The only good managers I've had over around 20 years in the industry were 100% people managers and had no IC type of role expectations.
I've personally walked away from multiple manager role interview loops when I ask about the split only to find that they expected managers to also take on partial roles with IC engineering work. I know I can't be effective in either when having to juggle two entirely different hats, and in my anecdotal experience I've never seen anyone else do it well either.
At the first tier manager layer, an ideal manager has skills in their workers' domain. That doesn't mean their job should require participation in that domain. Requiring that signals they are somewhat desperate to run lean, which wouldn't be a red flag in a small company but does in a large one.
Having skills is not the same as be required to use them. If your manager is an IC he does not have the time to manage you. He will be trading off quality of his deliverables for your management. No rational person would opt to get fired.
I do agree I'd expect a manager of ICs to know the domain, my point was simply that I never expect or want them to be contributing directly to IC work.
This is the holy-grail in TradFI, not sure if it applies to fintech. It's not uncommon to hear from people who own an internal process only they know that's essentially their whole job security.
The extreme being people that produce only one report a month and that more than justifies their income + bonus.
Isn't that why you have processes to create documentation?
I would forget half the processes I use if I didn't document them all religiously. The benefit now is that I can save myself significant time by having an LLM help me write the docs.
> Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports.
As someone who did have 15 direct reports for a while, it’s a joke.
You basically are their manager in name only. Your time is so split you can’t give any one direct reports the attention they deserve. Quarterly and annual reviews are a farce because you genuinely don’t really know how people are doing except the signals you can receive when you’re not in a meeting with one of your 15 reports.
Just goes to show how far up their own asses some CEOs are. Meanwhile real people just want a boss who cares. Hope Brian feels happier with an extra billion dollars or whatever this year!
> As someone who did have 15 direct reports for a while, it’s a joke.
> You basically are their manager in name only. Your time is so split you can’t give any one direct reports the attention they deserve. Quarterly and annual reviews are a farce because you genuinely don’t really know how people are doing except the signals you can receive when you’re not in a meeting with one of your 15 reports.
Don't forget "No pure managers". So, it's 15+ direct reports while also being "a strong and active individual contributor".
I've seen more than one pitch for knowledge products for "AI-enhanced managers", which are basically prompt templates that enable you to slop your way through 1:1s, ceremonies and reviews.
At that number I’d argue what you’re doing is not management. It’s basically “you’re the guy who fires people in this group”. For some companies, that’s fine, but those people will essentially never have your ear, and you’ll only have theirs in group settings.
I respected the "No Pure Managers" part. That's similar to what happened at our org.
The question remains, if there are no pure managers, then is this CSM / Sales shipping production code? If yes, then it's indeed scary...
> No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.
No pure managers is a shitty situation where anything people related is an after thought. That’s how you end up with a shoddy crew with a revolving door.
> No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.
This has always been the case where I work, long before AI.
what a weird thing to emulate. player coaching is super rare and there were very few good ones in the last 40 years.
why not, managers should be like left handed specialist relievers, they come in for a short time to handle a specific issue and otherwise let the team alone
Worse, crypto is irreversible at least there are legal channels elsewhere to undo. Even if these people don’t touch the crypto side they still create backdoors for phishing
This is exactly what stood out to me, too. Before this Tweet, my feelings towards Coinbase were completely neutral. After this Tweet, I want nothing to do with it.
> Over the past year, l've watched engineers use Al to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Nontechnical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated.
There's plenty of non-critical code that I would trust non-technical people with good AI tooling to touch. As long as their access is segregated from the actual critical stuff. But let them write marketing pages or help and documentation pages. Let them write internal reporting code or build tools to use themselves.
I ran content and educational pages for Kraken a few years ago. This was just as AI was getting useful. I was told by the head of security, the guy who coded all the original software, not to use any outside AI tools to proofread or edit. Then, a few months in, the CEO, Jesse Powell, asked why we were so slow in producing content - we had to edit it all by hand, as you do. We explained the security issues and he said "Who cares, just use it."
So on one hand they are the most secure business on the Internet and on the other hand YOLO!
Maybe I won't have to be concerned about job security some years from now, when everything becomes FUBAR and companies will need a legacy systems expert/software necromancer to a) discover, spec and re-formalize what their machine-generated black boxes are doing; b) build comprehensible and maintainable systems; and c) be responsible for what happens in the process aka swear by my work. While (a) probably can be done by a machine alone, and (b) can be done by a machine-and-human tandem, (c) absolutely requires a human.
But the few years to come are going to be wild for a lot of folks out there.
I don't expect Coinbase to publish a "we're hiring everyone back" in 5 years from now, but I hope at some point media will spot those trends as they'll - I have no doubts - will happen, and propagate that tune.
Must be the KYC/AML people. I've notice fintech is on a hair trigger to freeze your money for hallucinated reasons. Once they have your money frozen, they can use it as float to pad their numbers for investor decks and draw more interest. Spin up some AI CS agent that just deflects and wastes your time and they can stall out paying for weeks to months.
I realise you're joking, but crypto is now a heavily regulated industry, the KYC/AML requirements are no-joke and non-compliance will get the company's licences in a given country/state terminated.
For the end user it looks like an evil cash-grab, but really it's the company protecting itself from regulatory vengeance.
It has always annoyed me that companies can basically fire people for whatever reason they want, but more specifically that they can lie about that reason.
It almost makes we wish there were legal requirements for giving proof backing up the reason. It doesn’t need to be an actually good or noble one, but just in the sense of actually being accurate information being put into the world. I imagine this could be sold as a part of financial transparency laws.
Because as of now, it really seems like companies are using AI as a cover to fire people.
??? the reason for every single layoff in the history of the world is to lower expenses, and that is obvious to everyone. not actually sure what other kind of explanation would satisfy you.
But why is lowering expenses now necessary? If we believed the press releases, it’s because AI blah blah. I’m suggesting that some legal requirement for being truthful about the reason would be beneficial.
And yeah, there's crossover but they're not 1 to 1. At the same time, if a company is taking two people of equal position and firing one, or keeping the other, the honesty in how they came to that conclusion through transparency has value. Was the decision one of seniority? Performance? Geographical relevance? Was it favoritism masked in another reason? The person receiving the pink slip deserves to know the truth, especially in cases where legal matters could be of question where a company may say one thing, but be acting on another.
The justification doesn't matter for the diminishing pool of jobs. Companies should be forbidden from hiring for five years after a layoff, and from laying off within a decade after a merger or acquisition.
> It has always annoyed me that companies can basically fire people for whatever reason they want, but more specifically that they can lie about that reason.
Laughs in labour protections.
In many countries (the vast majority of developed countries, and plenty of developing ones), you can't lay off employees for any reason, and reasons can be scrutinised and sued over.
E.g. in France, I can be fired for performance after I've been written up and given an opportunity to improve, or fired immediately if I steal money or harass someone at work. But my employer cannot invent themselves a reason. If the reason they want to let me go is because they're going through economic headwinds, or no longer need my position, they have to document that, give me the opportunity to find another job in the company if possible, and if they're lying (e.g. immediately replacement with someone younger and cheaper), I can sue with almost guaranteed success.
"US employees will receive a minimum of 16 weeks base pay (plus 2 weeks per year worked), their next equity vest, and 6 months of COBRA."
4 months basic severance pay + 1 month for 2 years emploument is nice? so total 5 months severance after 2 years of working for them or only 6 months after 4 years
let me guess you are from US if you think this is nice, as European I would say this is fairly standard, nothing to brag about, 3 months should be bare minimum by law
As an American, I’d point out that there are structural reasons the U.S. often outpaces Europe in certain areas of innovation and business, tech and otherwise. Labor regulations in many European countries make it harder to reallocate talent quickly, which can slow down company formation and scaling.
That doesn’t make one model universally better. There are clear tradeoffs on both sides. But it is part of the equation worth considering in response to your point.
I'm not from the US, but from eastern europe. I have not been in collectives where what you're saying was true. At most I've seen 2-3 months of pay for someone to sign their own resignation.
"If you've worked for us for 24 months and we fire you, we'll pay you for 29 months and give you your next equity and pay for your insurance for 6 months" and "if we fire you we'll pay you an extra ~21% (plus your next equity and another month of insurance too) of whatever you earned" does indeed sound quite nice considering that a vast majority people who are terminated get nothing or next to nothing.
It'd be looking a gift horse in the mouth to whine about "well they get 22+% at XYZ"
> So, a manager who's managing 15 people AND expected to ship
Right?? I saw that too. My first thought is that any good managers left will be racing for the exit. You can't fake "managing 15 people" with AI. You have to actually have the 1:1s and do the performance calibrations. How are they going to have time left for IC work??
"IC work" seems to have evolved at Coinbase to mean "supervise AI changes". Then the question becomes how will managers actually review these changes and not just press accept at 3:50.
I assume they will have absurd metrics, like number of commits and token use to,determine how good of an IC you are. So, you start a bunch of agents in the background, merge their PRs without review, while having 1:1 and other meetings with your team. Productivity they call it
> manager who's managing 15 people AND expected to ship
Notable is what they're not doing--annual reviews. This duty is now handled by the all seeing "intelligence" machine that can evaluate employees in real-time.
Darkly funny that Armstrong's Twitter bio still reads "Creating more economic freedom in the world" when he has relegated humans to "the edge" of his own organization in favor of the pseudointelligent pseudogod.
Freedom for who, exactly? Coinbase's executives, I suppose.
So the reduction gets them closer, but still higher than where they were in 2024. Given the fact that the crypto business doesn't seem to be growing much over the last few years it can be argued that they over hired in 2025 and going back to 2024 numbers just makes sense. And as others have said in the comments, they haven't turned a profit so likely this makes business sense and the AI shine is trying to make the news less ugly for investors.
Every company is going back to pre-COVID employee headcounts because they all had to overhire due to all the turnover which has stabilized to pre-COVID era levels.
Coinbase famously rescinded offers days before people joined when they did a previously huge layoff. That's absolutely diabolical and I sometimes fantasize about accepting a job there and just ghosting them.
It started working after sometime but had hit this issue multiple times. Even my friend in AU hit the same error when he tried to open the same hn link.
Why spend any time thinking about the people at your company, when you could just prompt “make a heartfelt tweet announcing firing a bunch of people, make sure you pitch it in a way that we are seen as an AI company”.
Despite the proclamations of torment, suffering, and unwillingness to do it, but, they say, "such is life and this is what needs to be done", I often found in CEOs announcing big layoffs a quite visible undercurrent of joyful power-tripness.
Also, it is clear at this point that thought tech leaders decide, probably over group chats mere mortals are not allowed in, on messages to deliver for a few days, urbi et orbi: introspection is overrated; the leaders-followers dichotomy; now, the disdain for "people managers," as if they were imposed by the Galactic Empire instead of being people whom their organization hired for years.
And, like, what sort of message is, to be sent when announcing lay-offs: "from now on, teams will have not 14 but 15 ICs (whatever numbers), the new IC will be the manager, who will continue to be a manager but also will do some IC work"?.
Some of the biggest AI adopting companies are still shipping garbage (Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, etc), and I’m desperately curious what infinite AI resources are actually doing for them.
Brian once came to Hacker News to comment on a thread I posted (about being made an offer then ghosted by Stripe for a leadership position), so if he has the time for that I'd love to see him here talking about the non-technical teams thing. Could be an interesting discussion.
I usually feel bad for laid off engineers, but these guys profited off of pump and dump wealth-funneling to the rich. Sucks to suck. They all played a part in normalizing scams.
> Coinbase is well-capitalized, has diversified revenue streams, and is well-positioned to weather any storm. Crypto is also on the verge of the next wave of adoption
Crypto is always about to take off. If the company is sitting so well, and is facing imminent growth, then they don't need to do layoffs, they want to. Or the company is not sitting so rosy and they're not too sure about their future.
> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code
Consider this and I think it needs to be acknowledged:
If you're a leader and you've said that your company is too big and have to downsize by 10+%. This is a you're the problem.
Firstly, the business needs to have active business and new initives. If you are not supporting that: You've failed.
If you're so inefficient that you need that extra 14%, you made that mistake.
If you "overhired" and didn't find a way to use that extra capacity to find the business.. you are the problem.
If you say that AI has changed your business, that 14% more people means 14%*the AI lift of more capacity to accomplish greater things.
It's not the talent, and it's not the talents' fault for your issues. A lot of people assume that layoffs means removal of bad performers. The reality is not there.
Companies try to project strength especially when they’re vulnerable. Effectively this is sentiment control with the market. AI has given vulnerable companies the perfect thing for projecting strength when taking actions forced by weakness.
> Second, AI is changing how we work. Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated. The pace of what's possible with a small, focused team has changed dramatically, and it's accelerating every day.
As a reward, people driving the productivity have now received a reduction in their colleague pool.
Ok I actually like the idea of flatter orgs and player-coaches a lot.
However, do we really need them to AI-wash the fact that as a lot of companies, this company over-hired during ZIRP? Do we really need them to AI-wash the fact that the crypto hype is gone, therefore their business is smaller? “Company as intelligence” and “AI productivity” are just buzzwords so their stock price doesn’t suffer.
I was a IC/manager for a few months. Spending all day in meetings (there are actual things you have to do to manage 15+ people) and then going home and coding for 2-3 hours every night burned me the hell out and I left that company, good riddance to bad rubbish.
Companies above a certain scale- let's use Dunbar's Number as a good threshold- need full time managers to handle the necessary information flow through the company. Middle-manager is actually something that AI can't do yet, because their main job is to figure out what things everyone else around them needs to know (inside and outside their team), which requires a theory of mind that current LLM's just don't have. Is this policy change worth telling your team about? Is this feature creep worth telling other teams about? That is the decision that managers have to make dozens of times a day, and it requires a model of what various people know, to know whether this is important to them or not.
From some of the previous decisions taken by Brian, and the quality of his discourse on twitter, it feels like he has succumbed to something that afflicts a lot of rich people with frail egos: surrounding themselves with yes-men, they rarely engage with the reality as-is and instead with a make believe one. Elon Must also suffers from this as do the founders of AirBnB.
It wasn't that long ago that, in SV, the dominant values were humility, kindness and openness to all views (even if behind the scenes there was the ruthlessness demanded by capitalism). The last few years have seen this value system corrode, and it seems like its hurting everyone. From the tech workers constantly churning for no good reason, to the tech executives sequestered in their own thought bubbles until reality finally hits them (usually, too late to change).
This resonates but I can't put my finger on why for the founders of AirBnB. Do you have examples? Obviously true for Elon.
It seems like the previous generation of founders were always paranoid that their companies could/would fail in an instant, which led to the management styles of Andy Grove, Gates, Jobs etc (and I'd argue Larry and Sergey as well). That mindset meant they knew they couldn't afford to be surrounded by yes man and their egos were secure enough when challenged by their underlings.
Despite the intensity of all three, you hear stories of how Gates only respected people who could credibly argue back against him, Jobs empowered his team, etc. The current generation of founders seem to believe their own mythical BS to such an extent that anyone who disagrees with them is culled from the organization, resulting in a natural selection effect of only the yes-men survive.
Ah do you remember the whole Founder Mode trend? It faded just as fast as it started because it was meaningless. And it has had doubtful impact on the product itself.
"AI-native pods: We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact. We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role."
“ I'm sorry. I didn't think it would be this hard. But goodbyes are always hard, especially when I am the one saying goodbye. Today, effective immediately, I, Gavin Belson, founder and CEO of Hooli, am forced to officially say goodbye to the entire Nucleus division. (MURMURING) All Nucleus personnel will be given proper notice and terminated. But make no mistake. Though they're the ones leaving, it is I who must remain and bear the heavy burden of their failure. It is my fault. I trusted them to get the job done. But that is the price of leadership. Thank you.”
I have an announcement to make, using Claude I have now in development an AI model that can replace the CEO, the Board Chair, the CFO and CTO of any company on Earth.
I was shocked at how easy it was to train and develop a model that can replace senior leadership in a company.
The CEO was the easiest. I simply loaded the model with as much corporate jargon, double talk and the ability to talk down to people. The model nearly wrote itself.
Then simply ingesting the Wall Street Journal, Barrons, Financial Times and SEC 10-K reports and annual reports, I was able to compile the perfect CFO. It was able to spit out regulatory reports, answer questions on investor calls.
Strangely, the component of the model I had write in house was the ability to give up part of their bonus to keep key people employed. Seems in all of those financial reports, there were no examples of anyome that the model could leverage.
Its either of two things, either this person is going by market forces, saying whatever makes sense to please the market or the individual has not idea of what it takes to build software by self
What I'm worried is the push fo AI here, for a software platform that handles money is troublesome, I use coin base because I can send money to my family in other countries with no fees
This problem has been talked about and answered as back as 500BCE.
It's like the parable of the blind men and an elephant.
Each blind man feels a different part of the animal's body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the animal based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other.
In some versions, they come to suspect that the other person is dishonest and they come to blows. The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience as they ignore other people's limited, subjective experiences which may be equally true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant
That statement does not inspire confidence considering how ripe crypto is for hackers/scammers, if anything it makes me want to close my Coinbase account.
Very early in the first Bitcoin boom cycle I had a friend who was into it, so I opened a Coinbase account because I thought it'd be funny to pay him the $15 I owed him for lunch or whatever in Bitcoin. I bought the $15 on a credit card, sent it to his wallet, we had our laughs about it, and I moved on. Years later, after it became clear that the only purpose of cryptocurrencies is scams & crime, I went to close my Coinbase account just for some basic digital hygiene. Except I found out that now, they only let you log in if you have an external bank account associated with your Coinbase account. And you can't delete your account without logging in. And there's no way in hell I'm associating my real bank account with a scam & crime agency. So I'm stuck with a Coinbase account I can't close or even log in to. Lol.
> including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.
The reads like typical MBA-efficiency-idiocy taken to the extreme. Clearly this guy is so deeply isolated from the actual work that he cannot even begin to comprehend just how utterly stupid this idea is. It's one thing to push for 100x engineering "output" with "AI", but something completely different to expect a single person to be 3-4 persons in one. Pure schizophrenia - but at least companies like Coinbase which adopt the AI-first illusion will burn themselves faster and leave the room for something new and genuinely innovative.
Finally one ceo came out honestly and said ai is the reason for laying off people. It makes sense, no point in being obscure. It doesn’t matter if they over hired or not, AI is giving them the freedom to lay off. I would expect a lot more layoffs and more importantly the configuration of teams and nature of roles is going to change, has to change to be effective with AI
This is going to save a lot of money ... until someone loots their vault and they go bankrupt. "Non-technical teams are now shipping production code" is the last thing you want to hear from your bank.
Bitcoin is down from its highs and the big boys are in. Tether collateral is handled by Lutnick's Cantor & Fitzgerald and moved to BFF Bukele's El Salvador. Previously the combo was Deltec Bank (CIA linked) in the Caribbean.
The Tether narrative has just been broken and Iranian assets have been frozen:
This of course means that the primary use case of Bitcoin, sanctions' evasion, is no longer secure.
It becomes clearer and cleared that Lutnick and Trump are actually the deep state and the big boys mean it. Further crackdowns on China and Russia are coming and it does not look good for Bitcoin.
But by all means, cite AI nonsense as a favor to fellow founders to pump up their valuations.
>I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code
Good luck to those (human) teams when the briefness stuff hits the fan thanks to an AI hallucination... oh wait, the Active Individually-contributing leaders will be there to lend a hand, right?
I suppose not getting a layoff email and instead getting it delivered face to face would be more human, but that's American capitalism for you in all its glory
> Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated.
There is nothing that can go wrong with having non-tech people vibecode slop and push it to production... and certainly not when money (or monetary equivalents) are at play.
The behavior of companies when "adapting to AI" is like a famous phrase about communism - they heroically struggle overcoming problems created purely by themselves.
Guys I'm from Texas and I want to share something with you all, my friends I've made here on the internet from my heart.
I think all of us are a bit sad now that AI has essentially removed what it means to be a coder.
There will never again be the time like we had, the golden age of being a nerd. We nerds had it all, and then we destroyed it by making something too smart!
As a Texan, it's kind of like cowboys. Coders were wrangling the computer, but now we have been replaced by industry and mechanics.
Having read the twitter post, it was raw and honest, and I want to share some ideas about life that I feel are relevant.
The first one is that when you work, you should always do something you believe in, because nobody can take that away from you.
If you worked for the money, or because someone told you you could be a part of a cool team, your whole world falls apart when you get let go.
But if you work because you truly believe your work is worthwhile, you will always be glad you did it.
I feel that people on here continually complain about capitalism and how bad corporations are. I challenge all you all to check yourself and ask what are you doing to be a part of the system. If you go accept employment at a 9-5, you are part of the system and making it stronger.
I have always refused to have a job. At age 32, I have only ever worked at one company as an employee, and that only for a short time, and the person was a genuine friend of mine.
I ask each person here to quit working at a company. I think all of us should choose to only ever work at a nonprofit.
Fundamentally Capitalism can't be defeated if we complain and then try to negotiate the biggest salary or benefits.
It's logically stupid for us to be saying they are evil, when we do the exact same thing with a salary.
Instead, each of us should work at a nonprofit, and we should NEVER accept a salary but instead ask them to give to us when they have something left over.
Ultimately, friends, I chose to tell my boss one day (the guy I ended up being an employee at his small company for for a bit), that I didn't want a salary, just donate if you want.
Ever since then, I have been happy.
I hated life when I worked for money. But now, I love it. I have gotten to code on many fun projects, but for the first time I felt alive.
It was terrifying with a wife, a kid and a mortgage to say that. But I am a true believer that the universe, or God has a plan for everyone, and that if you stop worrying and doing what you are told, and just go out and love people, it will all work out.
What I found is that the pay you get working for free is better than the pay you could ever get with money.
You can finally live with yourself when you just love everybody, every day.
If you pay me, and I did great work, you will never know if I love you. But if I did it for free, for all of eternity, you will know that you know that I care about you. And that, to me, is worth more than all the money in the world.
That's why I never accept a salary when I work. I just let people give as they feel fit.
Yes, it is hard, and it doesn't always feel fun. But it is 1000X worth it.
Thank you for reading, God bless you and have a great day!
Many comments are mocking the "Non-technical teams are now shipping production code" line as an obvious disaster waiting to happen.
I think this will be commonplace in the not too distant future.
Some disasters will happen, just like they did before AI. Skeptics will gleefully point out these failures while more and more non-technical teams ship code.
Will they also do the maintenance, future migrations, and handle prod alerts at 2am? I’m all to empower non technical people but shipping prod code isn’t the way to do it. What will happen is a very large amount of unmaintained services with no coherence, that will accumulate over time. I cannot imagine the monsters we will after a few years of that being normalized
No, because you're misunderstanding how this works.
Technical teams still need to design and build out the infra.
Technical teams still need to think about how to design and secure the backend systems.
The only thing that changes is that non technical people can now build UIs and internal tools on top of your core assuming you have solid APIs, MCPs, docs, and components to build on top of.
If you're allowing non-technical teams deploy mission critical software then you're not doing it right.
No one wakes up the frontend dude at 2am because the JS is doing something weird in the browser... All of the core infra and backend should still belong to technical teams.
I'm sure Coinbase understands this and when they say non-technical people are shipping software they don't mean they're vibe coding terraform infra and deploying full-stack user-facing applications.
Many people say this and they also say (see top comment) it being for financial company. But this being for financial company is an extra layer of risk that I am not willing to take personally.
> Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports. [...] Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.
Oof. So not only are they giving their remaining managers more reports, but those managers will be expected to do lots of other, non-management work.
Sure, nothing can go wrong there... Even if they didn't have non-managerial work to do, 15+ direct reports is just too many. They're not going to get to spend enough time meeting each report's needs, not a chance.
I think as layoffs emails go, it's a pretty good one (as the current top comment points out[0]), but boy, I would not want to be working at a company like what Coinbase is turning into. Non-technical teams shipping code to prod? No thanks. "AI-native pods"? No thanks. I do like the idea of one-person teams; I was at my most productive when I was in that kind of role (though I'm not sure my experience generalizes). I get that companies are still struggling to figure out how to adapt to LLMs, but... damn.
Pretty solid severance package for the folks being laid off, though.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48021843
Or maybe we should go back to what it was before Google and big $$$ tech decided that if you were a "manager" you shouldn't contribute technically. Being a manager now means a bunch of busy work talking to other managers and weekly 1:1s. There is a ton that has been written about the managerial class. Producing nothing, but for sure making themselves look self-important.
Before that the manager was essentially the best engineer in the team (or the one that wanted to get promoted). Being a manger meant you were respected directly for your skills and you were expected to still be a full time contributor. Directors meant you were one of the best ICs out there. Now, being a manager or a director means you sometimes did an MBA in an unrelated field. This brought a ton of politics, nonsense meetings (because the most visible output for managers is more meetings where they can posture).
Let's go back to what it used to be. We don't need weekly 1:1s to check on feelings. We don't need a full layer of managers syncing with each others and taking political decisions that will mainly advance them. We don't need another layer of gatekeepers.
I'm not saying all managers are bad, but this charade has been pushed a bit too far.
> We don't need weekly 1:1s to check on feelings.
As a manager that does weekly 1:1s, I agree with that statement. But I do need 1:1s to check on progress, uncover blockers that people haven’t surfaced on their own, make continuous small decisions, offer support, assess performance, collect status information for my manager, and last but not least give employees the opportunity to share feelings frequently. They do, and it’s not very often, but it’s important to have a dedicated place for it otherwise devs often don’t share until damage is being done.
I’ve also watched devs who didn’t have weekly check-ins go pretty far off the rails. One dev I remember would go off by himself for weeks designing clever code and over-engineering things that weren’t needed. I thought to myself that someone should be checking in with him, and then months later I got stuck doing overtime before a delivery deadline with dozens of other devs on a weekend chasing an intermittent release-only runtime crash that turns out he caused by trying to get tricky with copy constructors. A quick 1:1 could have prevented this bug that ended up costing tens or hundreds of thousands before it ever happened.
BTW, the best managers I’ve ever had were technical contributors, and they tended to be more relaxed about check-ins than the non-technical managers, in part because they had a better sense of where things sat. Personally I also feel like a better manager when I’m contributing technically to a project, and devs seem to respect that more.
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The best manager I had in my career was a guy with zero software dev experience. Technical skills and leadership are simply different fields. Converting a best engineer into a mediocre manager doesn't sound like a solution for anything.
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As a data point, I work at a US company that ended up in this place and the same thing is happening.
In my BU there were directors with 2 direct reports. Even at the next level up, the number of non-IC directs is only high single digits. There are many managers who were already engaging technically with the product (not PRs but playing an active role in planning work) and they have no idea what directors are actually doing...aside from attending meetings with other directors.
Almost all decision-making capacity has been moved outside of teams which has resulted in almost no actual work (because everything needs to be cleared by someone with no engagement with product) and people leaving (because promo decisions are made by people who have no idea what anyone is contributing, the worst ICs are the only ones they can retain ofc).
It is a terrible environment to work in.
I don't necessarily think the manager should be best IC but definitely someone who is genuinely talented with sufficient scope and responsibility to make good decisions/add value for ICs. There are way too many passengers today.
Also, this is true of higher-level ICs. At my work, they have no real engagement with product so have influence through ambiguous statements about the general direction that get passed around like the word of God. None of these decisions, so far, have been helpful or relevant.
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> Before that the manager was essentially the best engineer in the team
I'm not sure that's ever been true.
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>> Producing nothing, but for sure making themselves look self-important.
A good manager is worth their worth in gold even if they produce zero technical output. I've had managers that were absolutely instrumental in my career as a programmer, and they did close to zero IC work.
>>Before that the manager was essentially the best engineer in the tea
Yes, and it was absolutely awful. Keep the best engineer in the team as the best engineer on the team. Call them experts, distinguished, senior++, whatever, don't make them managers.
>>Let's go back to what it used to be
God, please don't.
>>We don't need weekly 1:1s to check on feelings.
Speak for yourself please. I find weekly 1:1 extremely important for the entire team, especially in fully remote roles.
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You people (as in this HN community) have your conception of middle management taken from memes, comics and to some extent a lack of experience. Managing even 5-10 people means juggling projects, personnel management, being held accountable for all actions of your people, having to be sandwiched between the pie-in-the-sky class and the myopic individual, translator in between. It means jumping on outage calls, doing architecture reviews, and getting slammed with meetings.
Please tell me where these 'managers make a lot of money and do nothing but approve timesheets' companies are, I'd kill to work for one!
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I have worked in big tech, venture funded scale up - series D etc and yeah early stage pre-seed.
the places - where pure managers just existed i.e manager, senior engineering manager, director, vp etc - just added unnecessary overhead.
places that flourished had a manager who was also an IC - who reported directly to the CTO
which means I was 1 layer away from the CTO
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Crazy jeremiad here. This never existed as a norm across the industry outside pockets like Bell Labs. Office Space was not a film about Google's pioneering new management philosophy.
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> We don't need weekly 1:1s to check on feelings
Hard agree. One-on-ones are one of the silliest fads in our industry lately. Why would you wait until a weekly scheduled meeting to bring something up? Your manager's job is to be available to you when you need something, not just once a week. And if they want to know how you're feeling.. they should ask, putting it on an agenda feels very disingenuous.
Me and my direct manager (a C-level) tried weekly 1:1s for a full year and ended up giving up on it because it was clearly unproductive cargo-culting.
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I unironically want that to be me. Check in, make sure the team is 'well fed,' increase my team's survivability by talking with other teams and advocating for mine. Then I go home at the end of the day, take the kids to school, whatever... I don't really want to ever touch a line of code again either physically or by proxy (Claude code), yet I respect the hell out of engineers and want to fall on swords for them. Where does that leave me?
hmm, maybe, All Managers Are Bastards
This jumped out at me right away too. What happened to the days when a dedicated manager would manage 8 reports? What now? AI is going to double the communication bandwidth with these reports and further double the free time they have?
I do think the most efficient form of team is a "cell" of three people. One is a little unstable.
> What happened to the days when a dedicated manager would manage 8 reports?
Cheap money went away which caused companies to start asking hard questions about productivity and how much those dedicated managers were contributing.
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Just curious if there's a reason you mentioned 8 or if that's an arbitrary number? Was 8 an industry norm/upper limit at one point?
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Flattening is a management fad right now. Loser leaders want to be like Elon or whatever.
It is pretty stupid and pathetic tbh, but easier than making an effective organization.
Also, why use the analogy of player-coaches? How many successful player-coaches are there in the big leagues? There's a reason it's very uncommon ...
Its because when something is illogical, these "brains" retort to using some kind of a streched out metaphor which dumbs it down and makes it make sense, to them at least. So they invent the stupidities like treating a team as a Navy-SEAL unit or a sports team or... coming up with something like "player-coach"...
This ain't about sports.
In most sports you've retired by the age of 40 and most coaches are older than that. I would say that's the reason it's common in sports, but that's the exception not the rule
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I was a manager of 12 for several months and that was really difficult. I got a severe burnout, even though I had no IC responsibilities. I cannot imagine how could I dedicate enough time to my team if I did.
Earlier in my career I was a manager of a team of 12 direct reports (non-tech white-collar industry) and it wasn't that difficult to do on top of my normal workload.
Of course, as a manager my normal workload was reduced to account for the managerial tasks, because that's what most industries outside of tech do.
Isn’t this just an attempt to build a two pizza team (across the company)? Or the whole “parking lot” philosophy that built Patagonia.
Don’t know if it will work with this weird arbitrary cap, because 15 is fine for some things and way too many for others.
Mandates do be like that.
A 30 min 1-1 per week per report would be a full working day. Never mind that if you're an IC then you'll also be expected to support other people using your code, as well as analysing and approving decisions for your reports.
It might be better to have 45 minutes every 2 weeks with reports, which is 1.5 days every 2 weeks. Then probably another 2 days every two weeks for sideways and upwards meetings, 2 days for ad hoc planning and design work, and 4 days for coding and reviewing.
Hope they're well paid!
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30 minutes of chat is one thing but one might expect work to come out of it such as things you have to do for or about that person.
IMO it's just efficient to use any excuse to say "what's up, how did the house move go?" or whatever and make sure that you do that with everyone and that you behave in such a way that they don't fear or hate to have a 5 minute chat and know you are ready to listen if they want to say more. i.e. to take an actual interest in each person.
I think the point is to push people out primarily.
This gives them a narrative for doing that by asking for something which isn't doable. Then middle management applies the expectation unevenly to people below them based off of political favor.
lol I read "as many as 15+ direct reports" and thought it was hilariously low. My manager at google had like 50+ directs in 2010. And he was the best boss I've ever had.
Popular conception of what a manager is is wildly unambitious.
Weekly 1:1 is performative and useless. It's not what makes a good manager. What makes a good manager is:
... etc ...
If a manager is doing these things well I don't need a standing meeting at all. Or we can meet quarterly to check in.
Email is a thing.
Interesting. I'd define all of those tasks as the job of a team/tech lead, rather than a manager. I've worked at places where the same person did both roles, and it was not always a great mix.
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Median tenure at a lot of tech companies is around 18 months. If you meet quarterly with your manager, the median employee is only going to meet with their manager 6 times, total! Not to mention people change jobs, and org charts change, so even if you don't leave after 18 months your manager might. How can you build a real relationship with only 6 meetings total?
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This is stupid and irrational. It's like seeing someone eat 100 cakes, and then assuming everyone can do it. And then getting diabetes afterwards.
It seems quite counterproductive to assume such a system would scale to everyone else, or that everyone else could possibly implement this. This is cowboy levels of human resource management, not careful engineering.
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I mean I have 7 reports right now and we're a startup. And fully remote. And I'm still contributing as an IC too.
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I do think that if LLMs are the equivalent of more employees, then you'd expect people to do more managerial work and less individual contribution. Certainly, that's what I see in my day-to-day.
When your job becomes managing a fleet of agents, with all the design, planning, coordination, supervision and evaluation that requires, is that "individual contribution" or "managerial work"?
> They're not going to get to spend enough time meeting each report's needs, not a chance.
What needs? If you squeeze people hard enough there are no needs anymore, only responsibilities and urgent+important backlogs that have no bottom.
Welcome to 2026.
If everything is high prio nothing is and if the backlog is always full it's not a problem if it fills up even more. If I am at the assembly line, I am doing my darnedest not to make it run faster. One can only sprint so long.
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I'll probably get some flack for this, but this is about as good of a layoff email as he could have sent.
* explains the reasons (financials, AI enablement)
* talks about what folks who are leaving get in detail (first) and thanks them
* talks to the folks who are staying
Layoffs are hard, no doubt, and I am not sure he's making the right choice. I see plenty of doubt about some of the actions in other comments that echoes mine. I certainly wouldn't want to have 15 direct reports and also ship production code regularly. But as CEO, it's his job to make these kinds of choices.
The proof is in the pudding as they say. We'll see how Coinbase does with this new orientation in the next year or so and that will determine if this was a wise or foolish move. Is there a flood of talent leaving? Major breaches? Business as usual with better than expected profits?
Time will tell.
This email was 100% AI generated. I just edited a similar sentence from a claude code doc I'm writing - "we're not just X, we're fundamentally Y" is an obvious tell. I guess he's putting his money where his mouth is
Who cares? If you're getting laid off, the only thing that really matters is the severance package.
Its all lip service - either AI generated or hand written.
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> To get there, we are not just reducing headcount and cutting costs, we’re fundamentally changing how we operate: rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it.
For sure this part screams LLM
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I think a lot of LLMs are trained on corporate communications, and since companies have been copying each other for years, it’s hard to tell them apart.
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This is just good writing, not a 100% proof of AI being used.
I assume blaming AI is a way to soften the blow even if its not really a reason, it sounds hip and attractive to investors who want to hear that sort of thing.
Of course it is. That's the reason it's getting pushed so hard. Their end game ideal would be to get rid of all the developers.
“Welcome to layoffemailreviews.com - your daily source of best and most honest layoff email reviews in the industry.
Is there a flood of talent leaving after this one? Major breaches? Only time will tell.
Buckle up, and don’t forget your pudding!”
All these emails are written by AI nowadays and therefore they all sound he same. This is not a grand achievement or a sign of a great CEO.
> this is about as good of a layoff email as he could have sent.
Except for that tone-deaf part at the end, where right after he talks to the people who "will be leaving" (that is, the people getting kicked out), he says that Coinbase will be stronger and healthier for this. Which makes it hard not to draw the conclusion that the people "leaving" are part of the unhealth.
The CEO probably does not even think that, and just wants to reduce costs. But from what was written, the implications are decidecly suboptimal.
It would be amusing but counterproductive to have a layoff email talk about how they’re firing their best and smartest employees.
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> We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent
Is this code for "we're firing all the old people"? As I understand it, I can say I'll only hire proficient English speakers (a "bona fide occupational requirement"), but I can't say I'll only hire native speakers, as that would discriminate against various protected groups. This seems like the same thing—proficiency may be a bona fide requirement, but expecting they learned this year's workflow first is age discrimination.
I don't expect ethical conduct from crypto companies and will not be sad if they are sued into oblivion.
Ai-native ... as in have never done anything without the assistance of an LLM.
This sounds suboptimal to me - probably the kind of employee I would avoid for as long as possible.
I would disagree. I am among the oldest on our team and also the most in tune with AI.
I see AI-native as those who have embraced it, and are learning to leverage it appropriately.
Exactly, I think there's actually an advantage to using these tools with a few decades hands on experience. At least, I'm getting satisfactory results and I frequently lean on my experience to prevent AI tools derailing. But it's actually a lot of work as well. More or less a full time job at this point.
Age-ism is reinforced by senior people resisting the notion that they need to change and adapt. I'm not like that (I'm 51). But I'm having a lot of tedious debates with people lately about how they don't want to use AI tools, how their job is somehow special so they can't use it, etc. Many of those people are actually quite a bit younger than me. There definitely is a pattern here of people that are a bit set in their ways not adapting and being a bit stubborn. Age-ism is unfair to people that are actually putting in the work to learn and adapt. But life is unfair.
Nobody actually has more than 6-12 months of experience with agentic coding tools at this point because the tools were pretty much unusable before then. I was using ChatGPT and a few other tools before that for occasionally copy pasting bits of code or figuring out bugs. But that's not really the same thing.
Half a year is not a huge gap to bridge if for whatever reason you are a bit behind on this. So, get on with it. It should not take you that long to catch up. Especially if you are a bit older, the best way to counter age-ism is showing that you have all the skills already.
That's not what the word "native" implies, but I think that's what he means here.
Same, I've been coding for 40+ years, and other people I know of similar length of time also seem real quick to adopt AI. I'm constantly having to show the young devs how to get the most out of their AI agents and also adapting my workflows regularly as things changes. Weirdly its some of the youngest who are most resistant, I think because they are learning coding skills, and just have got the hang of coding such that they are productive, and AI is coming in and taking that away from them largely, they are still keen to code. While I've enjoyed coding, realistically it's always been the bottleneck in creating software. A lot of the process is about how to effectively manage that bottle neck, now a lot more options are available. Iterating quick, trying different things, experimenting. Much easier to throw something away when you have better ideas.
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Stop it. You are just making ceos like coinbase’s richer and right.
> I am among the oldest on our team and also the most in tune with AI.
Congratulations. But you completely missed my point. I didn't say old people can't be in tune with AI.
> I see AI-native as those who have embraced it
That's not what the word "native" means. In the human language situation I referred to, it's about the language you learned first. It's not a synonym of proficient or fluent. If you learned to code first without AI tools, you are not AI-native by any definition I would understand, no matter how good at using AI you may be.
It's not just "English-native" that makes me think they have this meaning in mind. It's also the term "digital native" that gets thrown around a lot and is absolutely about how old you are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_native
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That's not what the word "native" means.
...but you're probably expensive and getting rid of expensive people without being involved in an "ageism" lawsuit is a great gift to a CEO.
Except people who are learning to leverage it appropriately already know better than to generate important production code by "managing fleets of agents".
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No, it's obviously not. There is nothing about being old that prevents you from being AI-native.
I don't even know what "AI-native" even means. The term is sufficiently vague to shield any number of discrimination schemes.
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To be "AI native" (a la digital native) you have to have grown up with the technology.
I'm not sure exactly which children they're planning to replace all their staff with, nor how they plan to get around the child labour laws.
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"There's nothing about being a non-native English speaker that prevents you from being proficient." This is the comment's point. We're talking about proxies and correlations here, not physical law.
Hold up, even before discussing the word "native", there's a weird logical-disconnect between the above two comments. I think paraphrasing is the simplest way to illustrate:
{1} scottlamb: "I suspect their lofty stated goal of X is a lie, to disguise their true goal of Y, which is something common which companies find much easier and more-desirable."
{2} CityOfThrowaway: "You are wrong, because it's obvious that X is achievable... if you define 'native' in a certain way."
{3} Terr_: "Uh, what? That doesn't make sense. The feasibility of X isn't part of Scottlamb's argument. Even if we assume X is possible, it isn't evidence they actually intend X over Y.
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Native implies mother language. As in "this is how I learned from the start".
Either it's badly named or people are trying to be included (?).
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What makes you think old people have inferior knowledge on AI?
Most likely indeed firing old people, but at coinbase that is probably like age 28+
I think unethical and illegal activity is par for the course in most realms of American business. And I would replace “sued into oblivion” with mandatory arbitration and “appropriate settlement”.
> but expecting they learned this year's workflow first is age discrimination.
Huh? If it came out this year then everybody had a chance to learn it this year?
Everybody had a chance to learn it those year. No one who had already learned to code had a chance to learn it first, as in before other ways of coding. Not everyone can be AI-native.
You might assume they aren't going to be so stupid as to try to exclude everyone who isn't new to programming. I wouldn't. They're a crypto business.
See also "digital native", a popular term which is absolutely about growing up after the technology in question was ubiquitous. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_native
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First as in that was the first thing they learned and can't really think in non-ai terms.
> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated. T
Is Brian here? Can he speak more to this? What exactly are non technicals shipping to production code?
I've got no position in Coinbase but is that a wise thing to say as a public company? I'd be alarmed if I were a share holder
I worked for Coinbase. Brian won't even speak more to this to the company. He led by twitter post. I was there for 4 years (thanks to a great manager) but Brian was one of the worst leaders I've ever experienced.
Go on, spill some more tea..
This is (unironically) what big institutional allocators love to hear. They've been sold the idea that almost every medium-very big tech corp is vastly overstaffed and can become a monster cash cow and stop SBC dilution by cutting headcount + becoming A.I first.
They hear this from the sellside, from activists, from the guys managing their private market allocations etc.
Are any of these fields hiring?
- big institutional allocators
- activists
- the sellside
- guys managing their private market allocations
My company is doing this too. Our marketing team can use cursor web agents to make coding changes to the marketing website/blog/landing pages. The agents make the code change and make PRs in github where our tech team reviews it before merging. The marketing team is almost entirely non-technical.
Marketing team can vibe out PRs that engineers have to review and then shepherd out to production?
Sounds tight I love the direction industry is heading lol.
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To be fair marketing vibing content pages is different from managers vibing code that powers a trading app for example.
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I'm sure a lot of companies are doing that as described (mine too), but I have never in my life heard someone classify website/blog/landing page changes as "production code".
You just invented CMS.
I have non-technical people vibe coding internal tooling that the engineering team simply hasn't had time to get to [1]. It's been a big help internally. Maintenance isn't an issue because the effort to create it was so low, they'd just throw it away and create it again if necessary.
[1] Of course permissions are such that the tools can't do anything that would damage any of the systems.
How’s this actually going? I’m sure there are issues, but is it actually fruitful?
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I'm very much pro-AI but I'd quit your tech team on the spot if I were asked to review those.
this is the worst. Dario pilled in all the wrong levels. but that is a crypto company no wonder they ride the worst ideas to get rich asap. ICOs and NFTs are the closest thing to what we re living right now when they say they solved coding
I'm sure this will turn out fine /s
But also the type of investor who is into crypto in the first place will probably love this
Crypto bros :handshake: AI bros
> employees will receive a minimum of 16 weeks base pay (plus 2 weeks per year worked), their next equity vest, and 6 months of COBRA
As someone who lived through multiple rounds of layoffs at big tech companies this seemed quite generous.
Insanely generous.
I got laid off 3 years ago and got a mere 2 weeks + 1 month of COBRA. It was a tech company, but not a big one.
i assure you they don't do that to be generous, they do it to get you to sign a piece of paper which reduces their legal risk profile
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Companies with less than 20 employees aren't federally required to offer COBRA. Companies larger than that are required to offer at least 18 months of coverage. I don't know how large your old company was, but Coinbase is large enough that this offer, rather than being generous, sounds illegal? https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ebsa/about-ebsa/our-a...
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For the non-US readers:
> COBRA is the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act. It gives workers and their families who lose their health benefits the right to choose to continue group health benefits provided by their group health plan for limited periods of time under certain circumstances such as voluntary or involuntary job loss, reduction in the hours worked, transition between jobs, death, divorce, and other life events. [0]
[0]: https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/health-plans/cobra
Thanks. It’s wild to see people here express this as “generosity” when they are just covering a few months of what is in every developed nation considered absolute baseline, for life, regardless of employment status.
Americans are not remotely free.
This is surprising about COBRA - I thought it’s always 18 months. Moreover it doesn’t make much sense to limit cobra - you are paying full price out of pocket anyway.
I read that as they're going to pay the COBRA premiums for 6 months for the laid off employees.
The reality is that Coinbase earns on trading volume, and since we are in a crypto bear market, revenue is down. So they have to cut to keep the company profitable (or in line with what the investors expect).
While AI is likely a productivity boost, the underlying reason is not AI.
Yes, I'm not buying this story about layoffs due to AI. It's a convenient excuse, which these companies seem to be getting away with too.
And something else I don't get about these AI related layoff announcements: if AI was a productivity boost wouldn't you hire more engineers and technical staff to capture the value? Or else you're basically saying "we're a tech company that has no idea what to do with more super-engineers".
There are diminishing returns to more engineers. Also hiring more is like investing with leverage. You might increase EV but also increase the chance of going bust if things go poorly.
The layoffs being "due to AI" is usually about freeing up the budget to build a couple datacenters and buy GPUs. And they have to layoff 14% of their workforce because they are buying those GPUs at many times the normal price thanks to the zeitgeist.
They aren't saying that they don't know what to do with the AI productivity boost, but rather they think it worth taking a huge productivity hit right now so they can invest in the future. Whether their vision of the future is realistic...
Reading only the parts of the post that are not about AI does not instill the sense that Mr Armstrong is the kind of person who would hesitate to say that people are let go because the company wants/needs to save money.
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This assumes they had a deficit of engineers pre-AI. What if they had as much as they needed?
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At this point, I truly do not believe there is anything that could happen that would convince HN that LLMs reduce demand for engineering labor hours.
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Indeed. COIN releases earnings on May 7 in the evening. Q4 2025 was the first quarter where they had a negative EPS in the past couple years. Most analyst estimates for Q1 2026 are trending downward. This "difficult decision" seems to be all about getting in front of a bad earnings release.
Yeah AI is the perfect scapegoat for layoffs recently to soften the impact on stock price and investor confidence. Coinbase is obviously doing layoffs because they are strongly tethered to a stock market that is rattled by political conflict and economic uncertainty.
Honest question: On what basis do people even trade crypto? Like, how would one even decide when to buy and when to sell? Is it just based on looking at the charts? Are there any "fundamentals" (like there are for actual companies) that can be used to make investment decisions? From an outsider's point of view, the whole thing looks like a casino where people bet on random price movements on underlying assets that have no actual value.
It's a nice spin. The AI is so productive that we can cut people. Not "revenue is down, so we have to cut people"
Oh yeah, AI is just an excuse to sell it to the public. But it's not about that at all. It's about bad leadership.
Isn't this what he says in the post? The first reason listed is market cycle not ai.
Yeah, but imagine if he had said that AI was the reason, and how wrong he would have been if he had said that.
It sounds way better to investors than, we are in a dying business guys!
They're so tied to crypto that i'm surprised they haven't been tempted to diversify into other asset classes, or even yolo into prediction markets like robinhood did.
It would be slop, but the market would love it
I was logged in when I read your comment, so I flicked over to the tab to see what they have. There is a whole "Predict" section of the site I'd not looked at before with sports betting, elections, commodities etc.
Very curious why they haven’t diversified into real world assets. It seems like an obvious move, even if the margins would be lower than their fee business (~85% margins!!).
They’ve added tokens and altcoins to the platform, but I don’t think that’s a particularly strong long-term bet.
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Have they not? When I log in, I'm given the option to trade (apparently stocks, futures, commodities) and predict (via Kalshi, I think).
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Publicly traded companies get their stock price punished if they just announce layoffs, whereas if they say it is because of AI, they do not see the same treatment.
If you look at Coinbase in 2020 they had roughly 1,200 employees. By 2022 they had roughly 4,500 employees.
They over hired and now they are pairing back, this is all it is.
They already had substantial layoffs in 2023 for that https://www.coinbase.com/blog/a-message-from-ceo-and-co-foun...
It's because crypto goes in a cycle and now it's down. You should expect layoffs from them again in 2029/30.
Its been 6 years, how are you still blaming covid overhiring?
What would you blame instead?
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"paring back", but I agree. The overextended like a lot of high-growth, volatile businesses do
Share price can and does go up because layoffs usually means opex goes down
That seems to be the case with a lot of companies with a significant number of tech workers... I think every tech manager/leader needs to read The Mythical Man Month and pass a test on the content without benefit of AI. I know Twitter/X was lambasted when Musk took ownership and made deep cuts, but my own opinion is it was probably for the best and would be healthier as a company after.
I mean, I want to work... and I absolutely despise the push to keep dev wages down, even at higher levels. But the reality is, at least from my own experience, that most software orgs and projects are actually over-staffed and would operate better with fewer, more experienced staff. Rather than filling hundreds of butts in seats.
That's exactly right. Bad leadership got them here. Of course they won't suffer, but their employees will. But only because they announced it as AI related. So the investors don't care.
> Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks.
No, you didn't. You watched engineers use AI to ship in days something that looks like what used to take a team weeks. After enough rounds of feature evolution, you'll realise that what they actually shipped isn't at all the same. Anthropic's C compiler, which also seemed like a good start that would have taken people much longer to deliver, ended up being impossible to turn into something actually workable.
In a year or so, software developed by "AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact" - which is another way of saying people who ship code they don't understand and therefore haven't fixed the architectural mistakes the agents make - will become impossible to evolve, and then things will get very interesting.
AI can help software developers in many ways, but not like that.
AI definitely leads to some productivity gain but the claims of 10x, 100x, 1000+x are (for now) irrational exuberance. Churning out prototype software has always been quick, and now it's blazing. But these LLMs are like Happy Gilmore. They get to the green in one shot then they orbit the hole with an extremely dubious short game. The virtue is in their parallelizability but you still need to review their work, lest you come back to it wrestling an alligator while a ruined TV tower husk sends spark showers over the pin.
> But these LLMs are like Happy Gilmore. They get to the green in one shot then they orbit the hole with an extremely dubious short game.
Except that he got good at his short game by the end. LLMs will get there sooner than we think.
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I am an engineer. I hire other engineers. I run a company that ships usable software for small businesses.
We do this every day. I'm sorry to say, we are indeed shipping in days what used to take weeks.
As a software engineer who also hires other software engineers, I’m curious about the disconnect in our experiences.
I do systems programming. Before AI feature development roughly went like, design, implement, test, review with some back edges and a lot of time spent in test and review.
AI has made the implementation part much faster, at the cost of even more time spent testing and reviewing, though still an improvement overall.
We do not see the weeks to days improvement though. The bottleneck before was testing and reviewing, and they are even bigger bottlenecks now.
What kind of work do you do, and what kind of workflow were you using before and after AI to benefit so much?
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The only way you could possibly know that is if you're reviewing the code, which means you're not "managing fleets of agents". If you're not reviewing the code (and you wouldn't be if you're managing fleets of agents), then you have no way to tell what you're shipping.
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Can you link to a changelog that shows the 5-10x feature increases? I keep hearing this, but I don’t see anything I use ever actually shipping like this, or people backing this up with any sort of proof.
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Give an example.
I have an example in my line of work. Full service rewrite in a new language. Would have taken forever without AI. AI makes it easier, faster. The service has better throughput, uses less machines. Having a complete full test harness that allows us to ensure we are meeting all the functionality of the previous service is key. AND we are keeping the old service on standby because we know we don't know what might be wrong with the new one.
What's your example?
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Does what you ship involve hundreds of lines of HTML/CSS by any chance? Do you care about accessibility?
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> I am an engineer. I hire other engineers. I run a company that ships usable software for small businesses.
> We do this every day. I'm sorry to say, we are indeed shipping in days what used to take weeks.
I've been searching for months for evidence of this kinda thing. Do you have receipts you can share? Or is it more of the same "just trust me bro"?
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What you are shipping is not the same as what Coinbase is shipping. These are vastly different things. Making a shiny app with AI is great, I'm doing it as I type this. But I am under no delusion that what I make can sustain a multi-million dollar or even billion dollar business in the case of Coinbase. That's plain silly.
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Shipping garbage.
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Yeah absolutely embarassing take. If I had a nickle for every time someone sent me some AI garbage that was supposedly "thoroughly vetted and cross checked agent output", I'd be at least a thousandaire (gotta keep it real).
There are strengths, but if you think its writing stream of code and just using it as is, I would LOVE to compete against you.
Ever notice how people making this claim never come with receipts?
This bothered me some months ago, so I began posting all the non-sensitive LLM sessions I made online. That way when someone makes an assertion I can present evidence.
I commented this yesterday, I’ll repeat it again - what do you guys think organizations that have heavily leaned into AI are shipping nowadays?
Most devs aren’t working on cutting edge, low level, mission critical systems. AI is great for that. Every company I personally know have been fast shipping features that are being used daily by millions of people for the past 7 months.
We have the same thing on my team, and we also understand the limitations of AI generated code. If you’re more or less experienced, you can easily see the “good” and “bad” sides of it. So you kinda plan it out in a way that you can “evolve AI generated software”. I wouldn’t say the same thing in 2025 January, but it’s much different times now. Things are already working.
> If you’re more or less experienced, you can easily see the “good” and “bad” sides of it. So you kinda plan it out in a way that you can “evolve AI generated software”.
If you're truly "managing fleets of agents" there's no way you're able to sift through the good and the bad in the output. If your AI-generated code is evolvable (which is hard to tell right now) then you're not writing it with "fleets of agents". If you are writing it with fleets of agents, I would bet it's not evolvable; you just haven't reached the breaking point yet.
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Most of the people making this argument vastly overestimate the quality of engineering and discipline that behind the software powering most corporations. CRUD apps are likely to be the most prominent type of application across industries, and most of them are crud
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Yes, it can. I do this regularly.
I have literally built and shipped multiple things that would have taken me many many months to do and I’ve done it in under a week.
Many of these are LLM heavy features where the LLM can literally self-evaluate and self-optimize. I start with a general feature, it will generate adverse, synthetic data, it will build a feature, optimize it the figure out new places to improve. 1 year ago, this would have taken an entire team months to do, now, it’s 2 or 3 days of work.
The C compiler was a prime example of an application where the LLM can self-evaluate/optimise, with one of the best set of tests could imagine. Yet the end result was a mess.
I have experienced areas where high productivity can be had without much loss in quality. So I can believe it. But it really depends on what you’re doing and I firmly believe many companies will run out of easy stuff that we can blaze through with AI fairly quickly. At least that’s where we seem to be heading
What's an example of such a thing? Just curious
And your parents must be proud of you. You’re just another cog
People that manage AI agents are not engineers as they do no engineering but are instead just supervisors.
only dorks care this much about being an "engineer" or "artist". Who gives a shit if misanthropes on websites consider you a real engineer?
What is the difference between supervisor and an architect in tech products area?
Early in my career, people said this about programmers who (weakly) insisted on using assemblers.
Then, about people using high-level languages like C.
Then, about people using C++.
Then, about people using "toy"/"scripting" languages like PHP and Python.
About people who use ORMs instead of writing SQL directly.
About people who use JavaScript ("not a real programming language" was the dis).
People used to argue how it was the mark of a tourist to use anything more visual than Emacs.
This slight won't stick, nobody cares, and it might end up sounding stupid later. You can't usefully insult a professional engineer in 2026 by pointing out that they haven't memorized ASCII or the Arm instruction set.
> In a year or so
Look at the best models from Spring 2025, and compare with now (and similarly for Springs 2024 and 2025). Armstrong and lots of others are betting that this trend will continue, and if it does, the LLMs will ship code the LLMs understand, and whether any human specifically understands any particular part will mostly not matter.
> the LLMs will ship code the LLMs understand, and whether any human specifically understands any particular part will mostly not matter.
I find this particularly funny. There were more than a couple Star Trek Episodes where some alien planet depends on some advanced AI or other technology that they no longer understand, and it turns out the AI is actually slowly killing them, making them sterile, etc. (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Bough_Breaks_(Star_Tr... )
Sure, Star Trek is fiction, but "humans rely on a technology that they forget how to make" is a pretty recurrent theme in human history. The FOGBANK saga was pretty recent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank
It just amazes me that people think "Sure, this AI generated code is kinda broken now, but all we need is just more AI code to fix it at some unknowable point in the future because humans won't be able to understand it!"
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And if the trend doesn't continue? I understand that a company with Coinbase's performance has little to lose and not many options, but many companies are in a better position.
The problem is that executives could take the 15-20% productivity boost and be content, but they read stuff like this, get greedy, and they don't understand the risk they're taking.
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> and whether any human specifically understands any particular part will mostly not matter.
This is how I feel. It’s building things for me that work. I don’t care how it works under the hood in many cases.
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> - No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.
Geeks who didn't even stand near professional sports should really shut up about anything sport related, lol.
I would really like to see professional, established coach running around with young prodigies on a peak of their biology.
> - AI-native pods: We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact. We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.
And AI clowns will cheer and applaud this, not seeing that they're now doing the job of 5(!) people with the same salary. Why is nobody talking about this?
Also, I find it really bizarre that those neo feudal lords see their companies as just a life stock to count. They don't even count people, just see them as numbers to reduce/scale up. Modern tsardom, but instead of being tied via official decree you're now tied by your lifestyle and family.
"Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make"
> Geeks who didn't even stand near professional sports should really shut up about anything sport related, lol. I would really like to see professional, established coach running around with young prodigies on a peak of their biology.
Player-coach used to be a thing in professional sports a long, long time ago. There's a reason you don't have it anymore. A coach can't be expected to take the long-term view while also expecting to contribute. Most examples were players near the end of their career and they didn't tend to do very well.
The only place you see it is in fun adult leagues. Perhaps the message then is that Coinbase wants to be less professional and more amateur-like?
Your comment reminded me that this still happens in the NBA. At 43 years old, Udonis Haslem seldom played minutes towards the end of his 20 year career with the Heat. But they kept him on as a “player-coach,” in that he was a mentor to the younger players and assisted in their coaching. Kyle Lowry is another current example of this “player-coach” role, currently on the Sixers.
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Reminds me of how kings used to (I think, I'm bad at history) actually fight the battles themselves. Now the head of state, the head of government and the other top people don't fight themselves. Even the admirals only plan and command, AFAIK.
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The only successful Player-Coach that comes to mind was Eric Cantona as player-manager of the France national beach soccer team after leaving Manchester United aged 30.
He won the 2004 Euro Championship, the 2005 FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup along with a number of top 4 places over his 15 years as player and/or coach.
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I'm not sure the professional sports analogies carry over very well.
With very rare exceptions, professional athletes are just not as good athletically at 40/50 as they were at 20. They may be smarter in some ways--which maybe means they'd be better as coaches.
I'm not sure this carries over well to engineering unless you mean that the young people are willing to grind for a lot more hours on nights and weekends.
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Yeah. I'd agree with this if it were tech leads that were mostly just IC leaders.
But managers should mostly be about two things IMHO:
> Facilitating for ICs.
> COACHING. To elevate ICs and help propagate the desired "culture".
Not true. You often see it semi-pro soccer. Previously, you could see player coaches even in top-flight elite soccer.
There's a reason for this change. As players became elite and specialized by position, the budget for specialization expanded. At the top, teams could afford a distinct role for coaching focus. Since the stakes are really high (the difference between 1-3 points is measured in dozens of millions of dollars of impact due to relegation - a concept that is missing on most US elite sports) it follows specialization drive is sky-high at elite levels.
Thus, soccer player coaches have mostly dissappeared at elite level. But the role is alive and well in the semipro tier.
In roles where there's no binary, extreme outcome from specialization, like in semi pro soccer, or at an ENG role at a random company , it is only natural to have someone wear multiple hats and not specialize.
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I think Netflix started the sports team analogy for their hiring (and firing). But they don't put forth a "you're a part of the Netflix family". They're open about the work culture you're going to be stepping into.
And I don't think they're trying this thing that Coinbase is trying either.
It’s funny when bunch of nerds try to mask the fact they have know idea what they’re doing by some lame allegory to sports, military, or some other discipline supposedly more manly and rugger than girly (yugh) math, logic and programming.
“We at the coding company LovelyBeeBunny should be like the samurai’s of the old, willing to pull our swords to die for emperor…” etc. And it is always riddled with complete misunderstanding of the analogous subject, whether sports, history, or warfare.
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In sports like Football where CTE is king, there's just not gonna be enough qualified personnel to coach.
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Player coaches would be redundant given that most sports already have captains, wouldn't they?
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Lebron James
Let's be honest, this is a crypto exchange. "Line go up" is the only philosophy these people adhere to.
> Also, I find it really bizarre that those neo feudal lords see their companies as just a life stock to count. They don't even count people, just see them as numbers to reduce/scale up. Modern tsardom, but instead of being tied via official decree you're now tied by your lifestyle and family.
People don't work somewhere like Coinbase if they're concerned about morality or mitigating the harms done to society.
Even better, as an exchange, they don't even necessarily care whether the line goes up, down, sideways, or in fucking circles to quote the Wolf of Wall Street. As long as it goes somewhere, and customers are charged fees.
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Ironically, if they adopted a Wall St boiler room culture instead of masquerading as an innovative tech company they'd probably be doing a lot better.
I fail to see how this is specific to a crypto company. You’re drawing a correlation that’s not backed up by any empirical evidence.
The GP post describes a common problem in _most_ workplaces in the market today. It’s not specific to crypto, AI, or anything in between.
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You have to look past literally everything their leadership is saying and at the heart of the matter: This is a dying company, and they physically will not have the capital to pay paychecks if they don't do this. Everything else is window dressing to try to keep investors on-board, but they aren't buying it, and neither should you.
The crypto market winter that started in Q4 last year led to Coinbase's ~worst quarter ever ($667M loss). Crypto has not recovered. Coinbase has done nothing to stem the outflows. That same quarter HOOD showed a net profit of $605M; and showed a $346M profit last week. COIN and HOOD are two very similar companies.
COIN's earnings are in two days. They preceded the earnings call with layoffs, which is always a bad sign. And HOOD's net income has dropped by like 40%, though they're still at least profitable. You should be prepared for COIN to announce a similar drop; except, COIN wasn't even profitable before. Its going to be a bloodbath.
I see $667M loss numbers in the press, but I also see a positive P/E ratio? How does that work?
Edit: it’s because the loss is an accounting loss due to mark to market adjustment, while the company is operationally profitable.
I assume that’s still no great, but not nearly as dire as the reported loss suggests, and not a sign of a dying company.
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The thing is that the former crypto gamblers have moved on to gamble in the prediction markets like Polymarket now. Not sure if COIN is coming back from this.
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Almost every "AI washing", except for the firms that are spending massively on data center capex (Microsoft, Meta), is coming from a company that is hurting.
The macro is not great right now. The world economy is on a razor's edge. If things unwind, we could all be in for a world of economic hurt. There aren't many levers to pull us out this time around, either.
Crypto is in an even worse state. Investors want liquidity for the uncertainty. Plus there's the looming Q-day that keeps getting pushed earlier and earlier by the experts while we're also inching nearer and nearer on the clock.
what is happening to crypto that is causing this? I was thinking with the recent conflicts crypto would thrive, if anything.
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"They don't even count people, just see them as numbers to reduce/scale up."
I'm remember of when I went out for drinks with a startup consultant friend and she mentioned one founder she spoke with refer to his staff as "biological units" when addressing use of proceeds to hire additional staff.
That is bonkers but I will enjoy calling my friends “biological units” from now on
This is sickening. People that don't realise that companies are made of people are in for a surprise. Once they go public, they forget that, and it shows.
A company_is_ the sum of its people, their talents and aligned behind a mission statement.
This is so far misguided, I can't help but think this 'biological unit' of a founder won't last long.
"Neo feudal lords" might read like hyperbole to those unaware of Brian Armstrong's "Network State" fanaticism. He may not be one yet, but he's certainly striving toward that goal.
There’s also Yanis Varoufakis’ recent book, Technofeudalism.
> I would really like to see professional, established coach running around with young prodigies on a peak of their biology.
This is a really strange nit. You are aware it's an analogy about skill and role. To reduce this to being about biology and the impacts of senescence on ability is weird, and doesn't really apply here.
Analogies have to make sense, to be applicable. In this case it doesn't.
E.g. you can't just spew nonsense like "let's work together like a bee hive, everything for the Queen/CEO, no matter the personal cost to an individual" without others pointing out the stupidity of comparing humans with bees.
You can't just come up with a desirable adjective and start coming up with random scenarios in which those characteristics may occur. "Let's make the company strong as a gorilla, big as an elephant, smart as Von Neumann, bright as a Sun, as courageous as young guys from youtube fails compilations." This makes no sense whatsoever.
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Yeah my experience in engineering management: Very easy to be a "player coach" when the team was small, like when I had 4 direct reports. As soon as I had 9 (in an org with no TPM/product) my full time job was wearing 3 hats, and maybe 3 hours a week were spent on actual pure technical tasks (mostly scut work to unblock team members after-hours)
And it's telling that really good players are often terrible coaches / good coaches were not great players.
Like the guy who "just gets math" is often NOT a good teacher.
Perhaps it is time to unionize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unionization_in_the_tech_secto...
Unions can't fix the fact that crypto didn't survive it's first real Flight to Quality and is suffering against gold.
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Can I push to production anytime I want? I can run 10000 agents then no problem. I'll just move fast and break things and I'll get massive cheers because its AI.
You joke, but in a way this is the natural trajectory technology has been heading. AI has just increased the magnitude of it
These people should leave and start their own companies: AI-native pods: We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact. We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.
F these leaders.
> - AI-native pods: We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact. We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.
And then this person leaves, leaving no documentation or workflow. That's ok though, another ai agent will pick up right back and add slop on top of that until the codebase is a black box interacting with another black box.
Oh and this company handles other people's money? That's going to end well.
A major problem with player-coach is that it makes the manager compete with the IC. If we solve that it'd be more workable, if not it'd erode teams from the inside.
"I would really like to see professional, established coach running around with young prodigies on a peak of their biology."
Well today is your lucky day!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NBA_player-coaches
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Major_League_Baseball_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Rose
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player-coach#Player-coaches_in...
"Though primarily known as a dominant forward "Mr. Hockey" for the Detroit Red Wings, he came out of retirement in 1973 at age 45 to play with his sons and took on coaching responsibilities with Houston."[1]
[1] Gordie Howe, playing on the same NHL team as his two sons.
The player-coach analogy is very common in role definitions, and it is real concept in sports: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player-coach
I mean it doesn't really help the analogy when most of the examples in the Wikipedia link mention how it's either not done anymore for that sport or very rare nowadays.
How many player-coaches have their actually been in any major pro sport in the last 20 years? Zero give or take? The last one I recall is Pete Rose and that was like 1985.
> Geeks who didn't even stand near professional sports should really shut up about anything sport related, lol.
Reggie Dunlop is ready for duty, he'll get the job done.
If you don't like "player-coach", "quarterback" can be a better substitute.
> I would really like to see professional, established coach running around with young prodigies on a peak of their biology.
Experienced high IQ player in a team sport could also be considered player-coach. Players like Lebron James or Nikola Jokic come to mind.
I would really like to see professional, established coach running around with young prodigies on a peak of their biology.
Bill Russell is (was) the guy you’re looking for and he is arguably the greatest basketball player of all time.
Crypto was always a clown show. Not saying everyone working the crypto/Web 3.0 was a clown just.. This tone-def message coming out of the waning crypto industry is nothing more than an eye-roll.
> Also, I find it really bizarre that those neo feudal lords see their companies as just a life stock to count. They don't even count people, just see them as numbers to reduce/scale up. Modern tsardom, but instead of being tied via official decree you're now tied by your lifestyle and family.
The CEO is looking at revenue and at costs. He can see what will happen if current burn rate isn’t reduced. Doesn’t it come (in part) to numbers, which must be reduced/scaled as needed? (Along with other costs)
Brian Armstrong is still a billionaire. So it's not like he lacks alternatives to destroying people's lives.
I don't get it either. LLMs put the enshittification of software engineering into overdrive. The job is less fun (reviewing AI slop, sometimes even produced by entirely non-tech people like managers), the expectation of increased productivity, the expectation that we can now do the job of multiple people and salaries will decrease as well. I don't understand how so many software engineers I know cheer for this technology.
Do they not see that this will drastically change their lives for the worse? I'm in Europe, none of them has ever earned "fuck you" money.
But right now you also do the job of 10s compared to x years ago.
> And AI clowns will cheer and applaud this, not seeing that they're now doing the job of 5(!) people with the same salary. Why is nobody talking about this?
Exactly. People are too naive these days
> that they're now doing the job of 5(!) people with the same salary.
The Marxist view of everything valuable being a product of a person's labor is tired and debunked.
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What a sad way to think about other people
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Absolutely hilarious to optimize for having employees with no discernible edge whatsoever.
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Aahahahaha yes the solidarity of the common memecoiner must not be broken.
what's the point of having 5 people doing 1 person's job though?
sounds stupid to me
No problem if you split the gains 50-50. 2.5x raise for the one person.
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The profit from the employee reduction goes to the capitalists not to labor. So it is in the best interest of workers to resist reductions in the number of workers.
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delusions of having AI do those roles and the one person in charge over prompting will know the difference between quality and slop... guess which one I'm betting on?
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>>> And AI clowns will cheer and applaud this, not seeing that they're now doing the job of 5(!) people with the same salary. Why is nobody talking about this?
I don't think anyone is applauding this. The only people applauding stuff like this are the CEO's of Anthropic (because that means more tokens/profit). Most other CEO's in big tech have toned down the rhetoric big-time.
The job of 5 people being done with the same salary is a function of the job market. It's an employers market now. So stuff like this happens. If you had an employee's market this wouldn't happen.
fwiw - and this is a separate topic. If health insurance were de-linked from employment most people would flee the job market on their own.
> health insurance were de-linked from employment most people would flee the job market
That would be visible in all major markets outside of the US, no?
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> We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.
Experimenting or cost-cutting? Are these one-person "teams" you g to be paid more for having multi-domain roles regardless of how fast AI can churn out pseudo-MVPs?
We're going to see this become a trend beyond Coinbase, IMO. The idea that companies just want employees to be more productive is a farce. The C-suite would prefer to make no profit, have few to no employees, and get personally richer in the process.
Many upper level managers seem to be blind to the fact that the kind of person who can actually excel as a "do it all" is most likely not the kind of person that wants to work in that kind of environment. Those people will do a year or two pulling down a salary while they are also spinning up a side project, and then they'll bolt as soon as they can. It sounds like a recipe for constant employee churn, leaving behind a wake of fragile code.
I'm only writing this because Devil's advocate and all, but what if you're actually capable of all those things?
Plenty of us here can conceive, design, architect, build, ship and own things from soup to nuts, and feel a lot more invested in the result as a consequence.
If the compensation is good, and it feels less shackled and less bureaucratic, is that necessarily a bad thing?
The kinds of people who really can do all three always have options. It means you end up with a lot of turnover in these types of teams.
Seriously. Why is everyone just silently accepting this?
What is the alternative
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Well, yeah. As an employee in general one isn't that bothered about profit. As long as one's own job is safe and the jobs of the people one's close to.
Please stop calling it "AI First". Call it "we overhired, and bitcoin prices are in the tank" and be honest.
They overhired, and BTC prices not being actually in the tank won't save them.
BTC's price isn't the point. Crypto businesses are a shrinking niche (not counting cases like Binance, but those are exceptions), and VC money has moved on. Crypto had its shot but couldn't go mainstream. AI is a better bet now.
The company I work in, collapsed in similar manner. Started with huge AI reductions, now we're barely coping. Managers vibe code. All fix production.
However, I understand rationale, as the money was not in-flowing enough.
---- edit ----
When reading about AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents, I shout out. Hire me. I will tell you why this won't work
Can you tell us here?
If you’re good at something, never do it for free…or something.
Let OP make his “hire me and I’ll tell you why your AI first approach is bunk” market.
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> No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.
What's the theory on this? It seems to be common conclusion, but I don't understand why AI changes the situation here.
I understand that AI means you can do more with fewer people. Fewer people means less coordination overhead and fewer managers and fewer layers. What I don't get is why you want your managers to be doing IC work more so with AI than before. I don't see why anything changes about needing roughly 1 first line manager for every 6-8 people, or why it would be more beneficial now that the managers have production programming responsibilities.
Both before and after AI it's important that managers have real technical knowledge of the codebase. Having managers do actual production IC work in my experience has been a bad allocation of resources, though, and I don't see why AI changes that.
(a) Someone has to do the management tasks. Why do we think that isn't a full time job anymore?
(b) When managers do production IC work, in my experience it increases the load on ICs in review, because the manager one would _expect_ to not be _as_ expert as pure ICs on the codebase, and yet they are perceived as "senior". ICs then have overhead in having to manage that power imbalance in review. I have known a few extremely productive manager/ICs… but the effect on their teams was not super great. It made the manager into something of a micromanager and the actual ICs lacked autonomy.
Getting rid of middle managers has been the game plan for every headcount reduction for the last 50 years. They always seem expendable until a few months later when senior managers get overwhelmed and staff get confused and they end up making the same org they just destroyed.
Exactly, it's too easy to overlook the balancing that good middle managers do.
> - No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.
This is going to end poorly for them. The only good managers I've had over around 20 years in the industry were 100% people managers and had no IC type of role expectations.
I've personally walked away from multiple manager role interview loops when I ask about the split only to find that they expected managers to also take on partial roles with IC engineering work. I know I can't be effective in either when having to juggle two entirely different hats, and in my anecdotal experience I've never seen anyone else do it well either.
At the first tier manager layer, an ideal manager has skills in their workers' domain. That doesn't mean their job should require participation in that domain. Requiring that signals they are somewhat desperate to run lean, which wouldn't be a red flag in a small company but does in a large one.
Having skills is not the same as be required to use them. If your manager is an IC he does not have the time to manage you. He will be trading off quality of his deliverables for your management. No rational person would opt to get fired.
I do agree I'd expect a manager of ICs to know the domain, my point was simply that I never expect or want them to be contributing directly to IC work.
AI is the next big hype.
Crypto was a big hype of last decade.
Every year that goes by there are fewer people interested in an old hype, and therefore a smaller and smaller market for coinbase.
Coinbase is on a path to death. It might take 20 years, but the decline has already begun.
They can always announce they work in AI now and change nothing.
Or maybe they have to start designing shoes first, IDK.
I would have to agree. It seems like most of the new funding is going to AI at the expense of crypto.
Yeah, look on the bright side.
crypto is not growing that's for sure.
It's amazing how the crypto-bro influencers became AI-bro influencers over the past 2 years.
> We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.
What happens when this person inevitably leaves and they have no one who knows even a little bit about the process or tools used?
This is the holy-grail in TradFI, not sure if it applies to fintech. It's not uncommon to hear from people who own an internal process only they know that's essentially their whole job security.
The extreme being people that produce only one report a month and that more than justifies their income + bonus.
Simple, we make them use a company computer, log everything they've ever done then reverse engineer it
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Isn't that why you have processes to create documentation?
I would forget half the processes I use if I didn't document them all religiously. The benefit now is that I can save myself significant time by having an LLM help me write the docs.
Lol even if you spent all day documenting what you're doing it wouldn't be enough to transfer all the learning and context.
Don't worry agents will take over job
/s
> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code
With the amount of tech leaders blabbering about this, I came to the conclusion that the profession of the future is going to be Security Engineer.
AI-unfucker is likely to be a growth industry.
Yeah or anybody who can still actually read code.
Indeed, I don't think that's the brag he thinks it is
> Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports.
As someone who did have 15 direct reports for a while, it’s a joke.
You basically are their manager in name only. Your time is so split you can’t give any one direct reports the attention they deserve. Quarterly and annual reviews are a farce because you genuinely don’t really know how people are doing except the signals you can receive when you’re not in a meeting with one of your 15 reports.
Just goes to show how far up their own asses some CEOs are. Meanwhile real people just want a boss who cares. Hope Brian feels happier with an extra billion dollars or whatever this year!
> As someone who did have 15 direct reports for a while, it’s a joke.
> You basically are their manager in name only. Your time is so split you can’t give any one direct reports the attention they deserve. Quarterly and annual reviews are a farce because you genuinely don’t really know how people are doing except the signals you can receive when you’re not in a meeting with one of your 15 reports.
Don't forget "No pure managers". So, it's 15+ direct reports while also being "a strong and active individual contributor".
But now with LLM agents to help you…
I've seen more than one pitch for knowledge products for "AI-enhanced managers", which are basically prompt templates that enable you to slop your way through 1:1s, ceremonies and reviews.
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15 span of control is nothing for many managers in large companies. I’ve seen 30-45 before.
At that number I’d argue what you’re doing is not management. It’s basically “you’re the guy who fires people in this group”. For some companies, that’s fine, but those people will essentially never have your ear, and you’ll only have theirs in group settings.
Span of control is quite different from direct report.
The span of control for the CEO of my company is more or less 1000 people. His number of direct reports is 5
"Non-technical teams are now shipping production code"
Boy that's scary for a company that's effectively fintech...
I respected the "No Pure Managers" part. That's similar to what happened at our org.
The question remains, if there are no pure managers, then is this CSM / Sales shipping production code? If yes, then it's indeed scary...
> No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.
I've strongly disliked every team where this was the case. The people in those positions ended up being neither good managers nor good engineers.
YMMV, I suppose, but this combined with the AI nonsense just makes the dislike even harder.
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Can anyone think of a single successful player-coach in the entire history of sports? Why would this be a good model?
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Gotta be fun being a strong and active IC with 15 direct reports.
No pure managers is a shitty situation where anything people related is an after thought. That’s how you end up with a shoddy crew with a revolving door.
> No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.
This has always been the case where I work, long before AI.
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what a weird thing to emulate. player coaching is super rare and there were very few good ones in the last 40 years.
why not, managers should be like left handed specialist relievers, they come in for a short time to handle a specific issue and otherwise let the team alone
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Are they also held accountable for the code they ship? Are they added to the on-call rotation?
IMO managers (and directors) should staff the large incident management rotation. Helping to coordinate response, freeing up ICs to debug and fix.
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Worse, crypto is irreversible at least there are legal channels elsewhere to undo. Even if these people don’t touch the crypto side they still create backdoors for phishing
This is exactly what stood out to me, too. Before this Tweet, my feelings towards Coinbase were completely neutral. After this Tweet, I want nothing to do with it.
> Over the past year, l've watched engineers use Al to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Nontechnical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated.
There's plenty of non-critical code that I would trust non-technical people with good AI tooling to touch. As long as their access is segregated from the actual critical stuff. But let them write marketing pages or help and documentation pages. Let them write internal reporting code or build tools to use themselves.
I ran content and educational pages for Kraken a few years ago. This was just as AI was getting useful. I was told by the head of security, the guy who coded all the original software, not to use any outside AI tools to proofread or edit. Then, a few months in, the CEO, Jesse Powell, asked why we were so slow in producing content - we had to edit it all by hand, as you do. We explained the security issues and he said "Who cares, just use it."
So on one hand they are the most secure business on the Internet and on the other hand YOLO!
> As long as their access is segregated from the actual critical stuff.
Do fintech customers share your ideals as to what is "critical stuff" and what isn't? How much of this business could _plausibly_ be "non critical?"
Internal tools and help/marketing pages aren't generally considered production code.
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Yep I take this as a signal to remove the remaining amount of crypto I had on coinbase out. Fun thing for tonight!
What are the top alternatives? (And are they doing the same thing?)
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My employer does that too and people don’t even read or review code anymore.
Maybe I won't have to be concerned about job security some years from now, when everything becomes FUBAR and companies will need a legacy systems expert/software necromancer to a) discover, spec and re-formalize what their machine-generated black boxes are doing; b) build comprehensible and maintainable systems; and c) be responsible for what happens in the process aka swear by my work. While (a) probably can be done by a machine alone, and (b) can be done by a machine-and-human tandem, (c) absolutely requires a human.
But the few years to come are going to be wild for a lot of folks out there.
I don't expect Coinbase to publish a "we're hiring everyone back" in 5 years from now, but I hope at some point media will spot those trends as they'll - I have no doubts - will happen, and propagate that tune.
It is very likely a lie.
Must be the KYC/AML people. I've notice fintech is on a hair trigger to freeze your money for hallucinated reasons. Once they have your money frozen, they can use it as float to pad their numbers for investor decks and draw more interest. Spin up some AI CS agent that just deflects and wastes your time and they can stall out paying for weeks to months.
I realise you're joking, but crypto is now a heavily regulated industry, the KYC/AML requirements are no-joke and non-compliance will get the company's licences in a given country/state terminated.
For the end user it looks like an evil cash-grab, but really it's the company protecting itself from regulatory vengeance.
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It has always annoyed me that companies can basically fire people for whatever reason they want, but more specifically that they can lie about that reason.
It almost makes we wish there were legal requirements for giving proof backing up the reason. It doesn’t need to be an actually good or noble one, but just in the sense of actually being accurate information being put into the world. I imagine this could be sold as a part of financial transparency laws.
Because as of now, it really seems like companies are using AI as a cover to fire people.
??? the reason for every single layoff in the history of the world is to lower expenses, and that is obvious to everyone. not actually sure what other kind of explanation would satisfy you.
But why is lowering expenses now necessary? If we believed the press releases, it’s because AI blah blah. I’m suggesting that some legal requirement for being truthful about the reason would be beneficial.
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You're discussing layoffs.
OP is discussing firings.
And yeah, there's crossover but they're not 1 to 1. At the same time, if a company is taking two people of equal position and firing one, or keeping the other, the honesty in how they came to that conclusion through transparency has value. Was the decision one of seniority? Performance? Geographical relevance? Was it favoritism masked in another reason? The person receiving the pink slip deserves to know the truth, especially in cases where legal matters could be of question where a company may say one thing, but be acting on another.
The justification doesn't matter for the diminishing pool of jobs. Companies should be forbidden from hiring for five years after a layoff, and from laying off within a decade after a merger or acquisition.
> It has always annoyed me that companies can basically fire people for whatever reason they want, but more specifically that they can lie about that reason.
Laughs in labour protections.
In many countries (the vast majority of developed countries, and plenty of developing ones), you can't lay off employees for any reason, and reasons can be scrutinised and sued over.
E.g. in France, I can be fired for performance after I've been written up and given an opportunity to improve, or fired immediately if I steal money or harass someone at work. But my employer cannot invent themselves a reason. If the reason they want to let me go is because they're going through economic headwinds, or no longer need my position, they have to document that, give me the opportunity to find another job in the company if possible, and if they're lying (e.g. immediately replacement with someone younger and cheaper), I can sue with almost guaranteed success.
At least the compensation package sounds nice for those layed off.
What I'm really intrigued by is the non technical staff deploying code to production. Now that's a gamble I want to see in the crypto space.
"US employees will receive a minimum of 16 weeks base pay (plus 2 weeks per year worked), their next equity vest, and 6 months of COBRA."
4 months basic severance pay + 1 month for 2 years emploument is nice? so total 5 months severance after 2 years of working for them or only 6 months after 4 years
let me guess you are from US if you think this is nice, as European I would say this is fairly standard, nothing to brag about, 3 months should be bare minimum by law
As an American, I’d point out that there are structural reasons the U.S. often outpaces Europe in certain areas of innovation and business, tech and otherwise. Labor regulations in many European countries make it harder to reallocate talent quickly, which can slow down company formation and scaling.
That doesn’t make one model universally better. There are clear tradeoffs on both sides. But it is part of the equation worth considering in response to your point.
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As a European you're on a third as much though in the first place.
I'm not from the US, but from eastern europe. I have not been in collectives where what you're saying was true. At most I've seen 2-3 months of pay for someone to sign their own resignation.
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> as European I would say this is fairly standard
I must live in a different Europe then. I'd say this would be EXTREMELY generous for Europe.
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"If you've worked for us for 24 months and we fire you, we'll pay you for 29 months and give you your next equity and pay for your insurance for 6 months" and "if we fire you we'll pay you an extra ~21% (plus your next equity and another month of insurance too) of whatever you earned" does indeed sound quite nice considering that a vast majority people who are terminated get nothing or next to nothing.
It'd be looking a gift horse in the mouth to whine about "well they get 22+% at XYZ"
When I got laid off I got 0. The company I currently work for generally gives 0 severance as well. 5 months is extremely generous
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Average EU unemployment rate is ~6% with some countries as high as 10%. I think many in the EU would just be happy to have a job to begin with.
AI and crypto --- what could go wrong?
This: User just tricked Grok and Bankrbot to send tokens with Morse code
https://www.cryptopolitan.com/user-tricked-grok-bankrbot-to-...
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> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated.
As a security engineer this statements fills me dread.
> Rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it.
Oof. That smacks of hubris and valley-buzzwordism.
> Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports.
> Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor.
So, a manager who's managing 15 people AND expected to ship -- that sounds awful for both sides.
> So, a manager who's managing 15 people AND expected to ship
Right?? I saw that too. My first thought is that any good managers left will be racing for the exit. You can't fake "managing 15 people" with AI. You have to actually have the 1:1s and do the performance calibrations. How are they going to have time left for IC work??
They'll have to reduce these 1:1s and any formal meetings to a minimum (e.g. once a quarter), and deal less with career growth and people conflicts.
They'll switch to async communications for everything, and ideally have a bot that answers Mm-humm like a psychologist on his chair.
More seriously, the solution is to move to a flatter org, but that's a drastic change with unknown consequences for most companies.
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"IC work" seems to have evolved at Coinbase to mean "supervise AI changes". Then the question becomes how will managers actually review these changes and not just press accept at 3:50.
I assume they will have absurd metrics, like number of commits and token use to,determine how good of an IC you are. So, you start a bunch of agents in the background, merge their PRs without review, while having 1:1 and other meetings with your team. Productivity they call it
Yikes. That's bad leadership at that top all around. But we already knew that when they announced layoffs. No good leader lays people off.
> manager who's managing 15 people AND expected to ship
Notable is what they're not doing--annual reviews. This duty is now handled by the all seeing "intelligence" machine that can evaluate employees in real-time.
Darkly funny that Armstrong's Twitter bio still reads "Creating more economic freedom in the world" when he has relegated humans to "the edge" of his own organization in favor of the pseudointelligent pseudogod.
Freedom for who, exactly? Coinbase's executives, I suppose.
To put the 14% into some context, per Google, Coinbase headcount has had the following headcount each year
+ 2021 | 3,730 employees + 2022 | 4,706 employees + 2023 | 3,416 employees + 2024 | 3,772 employees + 2025 | 4,951 employees + 2026 | 4,250*
*Estimated following May 2026 layoffs.
So the reduction gets them closer, but still higher than where they were in 2024. Given the fact that the crypto business doesn't seem to be growing much over the last few years it can be argued that they over hired in 2025 and going back to 2024 numbers just makes sense. And as others have said in the comments, they haven't turned a profit so likely this makes business sense and the AI shine is trying to make the news less ugly for investors.
Every company is going back to pre-COVID employee headcounts because they all had to overhire due to all the turnover which has stabilized to pre-COVID era levels.
Coinbase famously rescinded offers days before people joined when they did a previously huge layoff. That's absolutely diabolical and I sometimes fantasize about accepting a job there and just ghosting them.
Isnt that the most fair thing for them to do?
It's better to do a hiring freeze before the RIF. Otherwise people have left jobs to come work for you and are now stranded.
Perhaps try to space out hiring and firing a bit more
You know, hire, stop hiring, then start firing
you don't even get a severance that way. People moved for a job, then got stranded without even getting a first paycheck.
Can't access x.com, getting "Invalid request rewrite". Has anyone else seen it?
Same. Replace x.com with xcancel.com and it'll load there.
Direct link https://xcancel.com/brian_armstrong/status/20516167591451857...
It started working after sometime but had hit this issue multiple times. Even my friend in AU hit the same error when he tried to open the same hn link.
Yes. First time I've had that error.
Same here
when we will see "we do not need CEO anymore. AI can do it better. we are sorry to let go CEO, we do not need him".
When tech workers finally unionize.
> Crypto is also on the verge of the next wave of adoption
Since roughly 2018 I reckon, at least.
This REALLY is the year of the Linux Desktop
I've been using Linux as my desktop for years - I've yet to spend any crypto...
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At least there’s positives there…
Why spend any time thinking about the people at your company, when you could just prompt “make a heartfelt tweet announcing firing a bunch of people, make sure you pitch it in a way that we are seen as an AI company”.
Despite the proclamations of torment, suffering, and unwillingness to do it, but, they say, "such is life and this is what needs to be done", I often found in CEOs announcing big layoffs a quite visible undercurrent of joyful power-tripness.
Also, it is clear at this point that thought tech leaders decide, probably over group chats mere mortals are not allowed in, on messages to deliver for a few days, urbi et orbi: introspection is overrated; the leaders-followers dichotomy; now, the disdain for "people managers," as if they were imposed by the Galactic Empire instead of being people whom their organization hired for years.
And, like, what sort of message is, to be sent when announcing lay-offs: "from now on, teams will have not 14 but 15 ICs (whatever numbers), the new IC will be the manager, who will continue to be a manager but also will do some IC work"?.
It is high-school all over again.
Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks.
And I suspect that over the coming year, we'll be watching the consequences of this unfold.
I d like to know what exactly Coinbase has shipped with this addition to productivity.
This goes for everyone.
Some of the biggest AI adopting companies are still shipping garbage (Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, etc), and I’m desperately curious what infinite AI resources are actually doing for them.
More reports for accounting? What?
Brian once came to Hacker News to comment on a thread I posted (about being made an offer then ghosted by Stripe for a leadership position), so if he has the time for that I'd love to see him here talking about the non-technical teams thing. Could be an interesting discussion.
Could you link the post?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29387264
huge red flag
> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code
if you vibe code financial systems this cannot mean anything good for your business
I usually feel bad for laid off engineers, but these guys profited off of pump and dump wealth-funneling to the rich. Sucks to suck. They all played a part in normalizing scams.
Your sentiment should be redirected to the leadership team and execs, not the engineers themselves.
Nah, they are adults. Labor should make way more decisions, but they knew what they were doing and for who.
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> Coinbase is well-capitalized, has diversified revenue streams, and is well-positioned to weather any storm. Crypto is also on the verge of the next wave of adoption
Crypto is always about to take off. If the company is sitting so well, and is facing imminent growth, then they don't need to do layoffs, they want to. Or the company is not sitting so rosy and they're not too sure about their future.
> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code
What could go wrong?
I keep seeing $x4% figures for layoffs. Is that right below the legal threshold for layoffs (e.g., 15%), or am I imagining patterns that aren't there?
Consider this and I think it needs to be acknowledged:
If you're a leader and you've said that your company is too big and have to downsize by 10+%. This is a you're the problem.
Firstly, the business needs to have active business and new initives. If you are not supporting that: You've failed.
If you're so inefficient that you need that extra 14%, you made that mistake.
If you "overhired" and didn't find a way to use that extra capacity to find the business.. you are the problem.
If you say that AI has changed your business, that 14% more people means 14%*the AI lift of more capacity to accomplish greater things.
It's not the talent, and it's not the talents' fault for your issues. A lot of people assume that layoffs means removal of bad performers. The reality is not there.
> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated
Given Coinbase is a financial platform this doesn't make me feel great. Hopefully they're contributing in areas that don't affect security or money.
Companies try to project strength especially when they’re vulnerable. Effectively this is sentiment control with the market. AI has given vulnerable companies the perfect thing for projecting strength when taking actions forced by weakness.
> Leaders will own much more
Heh. This is the kind of phrasing that just begs to be misunderstood.
Apart from "AI" making us productive talk.
Can anyone share how and when they see market is getting in a better shape?
Specifically I am curious, how we would be working with AIs even if market gets in a better shape
> Second, AI is changing how we work. Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated. The pace of what's possible with a small, focused team has changed dramatically, and it's accelerating every day.
As a reward, people driving the productivity have now received a reduction in their colleague pool.
And increase in their workload. Win-win!
Classic CEO, making it first and foremost about how it’s difficult for them to make the decision. No doubt used ChatGPT to write the letter, even.
Ok I actually like the idea of flatter orgs and player-coaches a lot.
However, do we really need them to AI-wash the fact that as a lot of companies, this company over-hired during ZIRP? Do we really need them to AI-wash the fact that the crypto hype is gone, therefore their business is smaller? “Company as intelligence” and “AI productivity” are just buzzwords so their stock price doesn’t suffer.
I was a IC/manager for a few months. Spending all day in meetings (there are actual things you have to do to manage 15+ people) and then going home and coding for 2-3 hours every night burned me the hell out and I left that company, good riddance to bad rubbish.
Companies above a certain scale- let's use Dunbar's Number as a good threshold- need full time managers to handle the necessary information flow through the company. Middle-manager is actually something that AI can't do yet, because their main job is to figure out what things everyone else around them needs to know (inside and outside their team), which requires a theory of mind that current LLM's just don't have. Is this policy change worth telling your team about? Is this feature creep worth telling other teams about? That is the decision that managers have to make dozens of times a day, and it requires a model of what various people know, to know whether this is important to them or not.
The same coinbase where my manager used # of commits as metric for praise. I'm so anxious to see how this will work out
From some of the previous decisions taken by Brian, and the quality of his discourse on twitter, it feels like he has succumbed to something that afflicts a lot of rich people with frail egos: surrounding themselves with yes-men, they rarely engage with the reality as-is and instead with a make believe one. Elon Must also suffers from this as do the founders of AirBnB.
It wasn't that long ago that, in SV, the dominant values were humility, kindness and openness to all views (even if behind the scenes there was the ruthlessness demanded by capitalism). The last few years have seen this value system corrode, and it seems like its hurting everyone. From the tech workers constantly churning for no good reason, to the tech executives sequestered in their own thought bubbles until reality finally hits them (usually, too late to change).
> "as do the founders of AirBnB."
This resonates but I can't put my finger on why for the founders of AirBnB. Do you have examples? Obviously true for Elon.
It seems like the previous generation of founders were always paranoid that their companies could/would fail in an instant, which led to the management styles of Andy Grove, Gates, Jobs etc (and I'd argue Larry and Sergey as well). That mindset meant they knew they couldn't afford to be surrounded by yes man and their egos were secure enough when challenged by their underlings.
Despite the intensity of all three, you hear stories of how Gates only respected people who could credibly argue back against him, Jobs empowered his team, etc. The current generation of founders seem to believe their own mythical BS to such an extent that anyone who disagrees with them is culled from the organization, resulting in a natural selection effect of only the yes-men survive.
Ah do you remember the whole Founder Mode trend? It faded just as fast as it started because it was meaningless. And it has had doubtful impact on the product itself.
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"AI-native pods: We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact. We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role."
Terrifying.
3 years ago they were touting NFTs as the next big thing.
Today, not a single mention in that email.
I can't help but feel that there is a superficial chasing of trends at play here (adopting the same playbook that Block used earlier).
Question is, where will we all be in 3 years from now?
Wait: Isnt NFT the next big thing anymore? :-D
All in on the next grift, of course. My money is on quantum computing.
“ I'm sorry. I didn't think it would be this hard. But goodbyes are always hard, especially when I am the one saying goodbye. Today, effective immediately, I, Gavin Belson, founder and CEO of Hooli, am forced to officially say goodbye to the entire Nucleus division. (MURMURING) All Nucleus personnel will be given proper notice and terminated. But make no mistake. Though they're the ones leaving, it is I who must remain and bear the heavy burden of their failure. It is my fault. I trusted them to get the job done. But that is the price of leadership. Thank you.”
I have an announcement to make, using Claude I have now in development an AI model that can replace the CEO, the Board Chair, the CFO and CTO of any company on Earth.
I was shocked at how easy it was to train and develop a model that can replace senior leadership in a company.
The CEO was the easiest. I simply loaded the model with as much corporate jargon, double talk and the ability to talk down to people. The model nearly wrote itself.
Then simply ingesting the Wall Street Journal, Barrons, Financial Times and SEC 10-K reports and annual reports, I was able to compile the perfect CFO. It was able to spit out regulatory reports, answer questions on investor calls.
Strangely, the component of the model I had write in house was the ability to give up part of their bonus to keep key people employed. Seems in all of those financial reports, there were no examples of anyome that the model could leverage.
Its either of two things, either this person is going by market forces, saying whatever makes sense to please the market or the individual has not idea of what it takes to build software by self
What I'm worried is the push fo AI here, for a software platform that handles money is troublesome, I use coin base because I can send money to my family in other countries with no fees
Not sure i would trust coinbase with any cyrpto from now on.
I'm still baffled how crypto is still around.
How long would it be that people realise that they are playing "passing the parcel" with a ticking explosive?
I never much liked Coinbase. I like them much less now.
It's fascinating to watch org managers decide that AI has made people management easy and cheap, instead of org management
Crypto was always sorta a casino - and there are just better casinos today - sports betting, prediction markets, etc.
This problem has been talked about and answered as back as 500BCE. It's like the parable of the blind men and an elephant. Each blind man feels a different part of the animal's body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the animal based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other. In some versions, they come to suspect that the other person is dishonest and they come to blows. The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience as they ignore other people's limited, subjective experiences which may be equally true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant
Lol “Non-technical teams are now shipping production code” definitely what I want my financial institution doing.
That statement does not inspire confidence considering how ripe crypto is for hackers/scammers, if anything it makes me want to close my Coinbase account.
Very early in the first Bitcoin boom cycle I had a friend who was into it, so I opened a Coinbase account because I thought it'd be funny to pay him the $15 I owed him for lunch or whatever in Bitcoin. I bought the $15 on a credit card, sent it to his wallet, we had our laughs about it, and I moved on. Years later, after it became clear that the only purpose of cryptocurrencies is scams & crime, I went to close my Coinbase account just for some basic digital hygiene. Except I found out that now, they only let you log in if you have an external bank account associated with your Coinbase account. And you can't delete your account without logging in. And there's no way in hell I'm associating my real bank account with a scam & crime agency. So I'm stuck with a Coinbase account I can't close or even log in to. Lol.
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Closing mine today
Given how crypto is the priority target for NK hackers it doesn't fare well for Coinbase to engage in such reckless behavior.
Reckless behavior? In my crypto currency? It's impossible!
Not like it ever stopped the crypto industry before, if we're being honest
Exactly. That is completely irresponsible of them.
It takes one massive breach and theft from the exchange as a result of this and they are cooked.
Exchanges never recover after billions of dollars get stolen from the exchange.
`wallet.transfer(&mut dest).unwrap()`
Depends on what they're shipping. We're doing this with UI work, as long as your backend is secure I don't see what the issue is personally.
Generally engineers are not well placed to be building UIs.
Frontend has plenty of security considerations.
You are a npm import away from having big problems.
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> including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.
The reads like typical MBA-efficiency-idiocy taken to the extreme. Clearly this guy is so deeply isolated from the actual work that he cannot even begin to comprehend just how utterly stupid this idea is. It's one thing to push for 100x engineering "output" with "AI", but something completely different to expect a single person to be 3-4 persons in one. Pure schizophrenia - but at least companies like Coinbase which adopt the AI-first illusion will burn themselves faster and leave the room for something new and genuinely innovative.
Finally one ceo came out honestly and said ai is the reason for laying off people. It makes sense, no point in being obscure. It doesn’t matter if they over hired or not, AI is giving them the freedom to lay off. I would expect a lot more layoffs and more importantly the configuration of teams and nature of roles is going to change, has to change to be effective with AI
How does the “flattening” affect equity grants. With fewer employees, does each get larger equity stakes?
"Non-technical teams are now shipping production code"
This is going to save a lot of money ... until someone loots their vault and they go bankrupt. "Non-technical teams are now shipping production code" is the last thing you want to hear from your bank.
It is weird to read this considering they should have enough money to employ enough software engineers.
Why would non-programmers need to ship production code in a financial context?
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It's far better to frame this in terms of AI efficiency, than a dying crypto market.
Anyone else get a clouflare error 1035 when trying to visit the tweet?
Yes. Alternative URL: https://xcancel.com/brian_armstrong/status/20516167591451857...
Thank you
Changing much of their code to be AI written is not a good sign.
Bitcoin is down from its highs and the big boys are in. Tether collateral is handled by Lutnick's Cantor & Fitzgerald and moved to BFF Bukele's El Salvador. Previously the combo was Deltec Bank (CIA linked) in the Caribbean.
The Tether narrative has just been broken and Iranian assets have been frozen:
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/04/24/politics/us-freezes-crypt...
This of course means that the primary use case of Bitcoin, sanctions' evasion, is no longer secure.
It becomes clearer and cleared that Lutnick and Trump are actually the deep state and the big boys mean it. Further crackdowns on China and Russia are coming and it does not look good for Bitcoin.
But by all means, cite AI nonsense as a favor to fellow founders to pump up their valuations.
16weeks plus week or so per year of service is pretty good
Even his post is written by AI. Now that's efficiency!
>I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code
Good luck to those (human) teams when the briefness stuff hits the fan thanks to an AI hallucination... oh wait, the Active Individually-contributing leaders will be there to lend a hand, right?
That reminds me, I'll need to stock up on rum so I can cheer the more spectacular detonations.
If I were an employee that got laid off with this email, I'd be really angry and sad.
Is there a different layoff email that would leave you satisfied and happy?
I suppose not getting a layoff email and instead getting it delivered face to face would be more human, but that's American capitalism for you in all its glory
"As the CEO responsible for the asinine decisions that got us here, I am stepping down immediately, without severance."
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> Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated.
There is nothing that can go wrong with having non-tech people vibecode slop and push it to production... and certainly not when money (or monetary equivalents) are at play.
Recession signal.
Web3 cycle signal*
"Difficult decision" says billionaire sacking people, many of whom have families, so he can make even more money.
The behavior of companies when "adapting to AI" is like a famous phrase about communism - they heroically struggle overcoming problems created purely by themselves.
I would love to see what IC Brian is doing.
Print it all out and bring it to the meeting please.
Coinbase has achieved "AGI" internally.
Another dying business betting on AI to save them. Good riddance
"But don't worry, I assure you I still intend to personally become wealthy. Thank you for your time and attention to this matter!"
Imagine seeing this headline in 2019. Heads would explode. Welcome to the actual future, where things aren't so rosy.
What is going to be the event that triggers Wall Street to realize a lot of these companies have been lying about their financials?
Crypto in bear market, volume is down. Less money to skim. Layoff.
The AI bullshit is CEO feel-good talk.
Guys I'm from Texas and I want to share something with you all, my friends I've made here on the internet from my heart.
I think all of us are a bit sad now that AI has essentially removed what it means to be a coder.
There will never again be the time like we had, the golden age of being a nerd. We nerds had it all, and then we destroyed it by making something too smart!
As a Texan, it's kind of like cowboys. Coders were wrangling the computer, but now we have been replaced by industry and mechanics.
Having read the twitter post, it was raw and honest, and I want to share some ideas about life that I feel are relevant.
The first one is that when you work, you should always do something you believe in, because nobody can take that away from you.
If you worked for the money, or because someone told you you could be a part of a cool team, your whole world falls apart when you get let go.
But if you work because you truly believe your work is worthwhile, you will always be glad you did it.
I feel that people on here continually complain about capitalism and how bad corporations are. I challenge all you all to check yourself and ask what are you doing to be a part of the system. If you go accept employment at a 9-5, you are part of the system and making it stronger.
I have always refused to have a job. At age 32, I have only ever worked at one company as an employee, and that only for a short time, and the person was a genuine friend of mine.
I ask each person here to quit working at a company. I think all of us should choose to only ever work at a nonprofit.
Fundamentally Capitalism can't be defeated if we complain and then try to negotiate the biggest salary or benefits.
It's logically stupid for us to be saying they are evil, when we do the exact same thing with a salary.
Instead, each of us should work at a nonprofit, and we should NEVER accept a salary but instead ask them to give to us when they have something left over.
Ultimately, friends, I chose to tell my boss one day (the guy I ended up being an employee at his small company for for a bit), that I didn't want a salary, just donate if you want.
Ever since then, I have been happy.
I hated life when I worked for money. But now, I love it. I have gotten to code on many fun projects, but for the first time I felt alive.
It was terrifying with a wife, a kid and a mortgage to say that. But I am a true believer that the universe, or God has a plan for everyone, and that if you stop worrying and doing what you are told, and just go out and love people, it will all work out.
What I found is that the pay you get working for free is better than the pay you could ever get with money.
You can finally live with yourself when you just love everybody, every day.
If you pay me, and I did great work, you will never know if I love you. But if I did it for free, for all of eternity, you will know that you know that I care about you. And that, to me, is worth more than all the money in the world.
That's why I never accept a salary when I work. I just let people give as they feel fit.
Yes, it is hard, and it doesn't always feel fun. But it is 1000X worth it.
Thank you for reading, God bless you and have a great day!
To me that sounds like financial issues dressed in PR slop.
ok sure good luck. more like conbase anyway
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Lots of layoffs this year. The economy is in bad shape.
Everyone I know is barely holding on, markets doing well though but tbh it feels like a mad scramble last resort sort of thing
yeah, check reddit. now even front page is people talking how hard it is. everywhere.
Many comments are mocking the "Non-technical teams are now shipping production code" line as an obvious disaster waiting to happen.
I think this will be commonplace in the not too distant future.
Some disasters will happen, just like they did before AI. Skeptics will gleefully point out these failures while more and more non-technical teams ship code.
Will they also do the maintenance, future migrations, and handle prod alerts at 2am? I’m all to empower non technical people but shipping prod code isn’t the way to do it. What will happen is a very large amount of unmaintained services with no coherence, that will accumulate over time. I cannot imagine the monsters we will after a few years of that being normalized
No, because you're misunderstanding how this works.
Technical teams still need to design and build out the infra.
Technical teams still need to think about how to design and secure the backend systems.
The only thing that changes is that non technical people can now build UIs and internal tools on top of your core assuming you have solid APIs, MCPs, docs, and components to build on top of.
If you're allowing non-technical teams deploy mission critical software then you're not doing it right.
No one wakes up the frontend dude at 2am because the JS is doing something weird in the browser... All of the core infra and backend should still belong to technical teams.
I'm sure Coinbase understands this and when they say non-technical people are shipping software they don't mean they're vibe coding terraform infra and deploying full-stack user-facing applications.
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Many people say this and they also say (see top comment) it being for financial company. But this being for financial company is an extra layer of risk that I am not willing to take personally.
What could also happen is that we stop needing companies that produce software altogether.
> I think this will be commonplace in the not too distant future.
And due to this it deserves even more mockery.