Coinbase CEO explains why he fired engineers who didn’t try AI immediately

Because he's the CEO of Coinbase, what else would you expect someone with that job title to do?

The dude looks like he's unironically roleplaying his life as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen.

AI and crypto working together sounds redundant.

Fuck all cryptobros. With a saguaro.

a chollo cactus.
Pretty sure those are protected and far too niche for the likes of him. A chainsaw would do nicely instead.

Coinbase has always been the laughingstock. They're not a real exchange.

Armstrong was shocked at the thought. “I went rogue,” he said, and posted a mandate in the company’s main engineering Slack channel. “I said, ‘AI is important. We need you to all learn it and at least onboard. You don’t have to use it every day yet until we do some training, but at least onboard by the end of the week. And if not, I’m hosting a meeting on Saturday with everybody who hasn’t done it and I’d like to meet with you to understand why.’”
At the meeting, some people had reasonable explanations for not getting their AI assistant accounts set up during the week, like being on vacation, Armstrong said.
“I jumped on this call on Saturday and there were a couple people that had not done it. Some of them had a good reason, because they were just getting back from some trip or something, and some of them didn’t [have a good reason]. And they got fired.”
Armstrong admits that it was a “heavy-handed approach” and there were people in the company who “didn’t like it.”

He gave them one week? So he has poor planning skills, he's impatient with terrible impulse control, he's unable to motivate people (probably because they know he's an intolerable ass) and his big idea is "do what everyone else is doing, even if you don't know why." Sounds like CEO is the only job he can do. What a fool.

Meetings on a Saturday? Intolerable ass is correct.
Funnily enough AI can probably do his job far better
- You're probably right. LLMs specialize in spouting bullshit, which seems to be the main requirement for a CEO too.
- CEO is the #1 job that should be replaced by AI.

The guy is such an asshole. I’d never apply to work there. He had a policy where he personally needs to approve of every single person hired there. He’s a micromanager, Elon wannabe douche. I have some crypto with Coinbase, but I will never add more to it. Eventually, some day I’ll pull it out. The problem is other companies in crypto are also run by raging assholes — Kraken for instance was founded by a total dickhead.

All crypto"currencies" are greed-inducing society-eroding pyramid schemes.
Get out this Crypto Cult Science.
✍︎ arscyni.cc: modernity ∝ nature.
Crypto is full of scammers that are not allowed to trade securities because of criminal activities.
Do they give you some sort of return or interest for having cryptosystem with them? If not why not just store it in your own wallet. I thought the whole point of crypto currencies was to decentralise it.
If you have crypto on coinbase, does that mean you don't have the private key?
What's with the kraken dude?
- The guy was under FBI investigation until the Trump admin dropped the case, but also…
  From Wikipedia:
  In 2019, Powell suggested that parenting was a distraction to being productive and critiqued the economic viability of parental leaves; he went on to question whether choosing to not abide by relevant governmental regulations was a risk worth taking.[40] In June 2022, Powell urged employees in a work meeting to reject the usage of preferred gender pronouns; he then opened a Slack channel to debate whether people should be allowed to choose their gender but not their race or ethnicity.[7] The next day, Kraken released a "culture document" which outlined the libertarian values that it asserted were to be obeyed at work.[7] Among other things, employees were prohibited from labelling others' comments as "toxic, hateful, racist", etc., and particular emphasis was assigned on how "offensiveness" was not forbidden.[7] Powell and his fellow executives encouraged employees who disagreed with the policy to quit, and offered four months' severance for those who opted to do so.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraken_(cryptocurrency_exchange)
- I heard he doesn’t return his trolley

Let's all drop everything. There's something shiny and new hereabouts.

It’s hard to find programmers these days who aren’t using AI coding assistants in some capacity, especially to write the repetitive, mundane bits.

God damn it, stop it with this. No it isn’t. Most of the devs that I personally know won’t touch LLMs with a ten foot pole.

I'd be interested in some proper studies, but most of the devs I know, myself included, use it for reference at least. Haven't met a vibe coder yet though.
- In my left hand, I have a manfile, written by the very same people who wrote the tool or language that I'm trying to use. It is concise, contains true information, and won't change if I look up the same thing again later.
  In my right hand, I have a pathological liar, who also kinda sorta read the manfile and then smooshed it together with 20 other manuals.
  I wonder which of these options is a more reliable reference tool for me? Hmm. It's difficult to tell.
- I tried using it as reference, but it lied more than the datasheets.
- I mostly vibecode throw away shit. I am not shipping this python script that is resizing and then embedding images into this .xls. Or the simple static html/css generator because hosting a full blown app is overkill when I just wanna show something to some non-tech colleagues. Stuff that would take half, to an hour to throw together now takes like 5-10min. I wouldn't trust it to do anything more complicated because it fucks up all the time, leans too heavily on its training data instead of referencing docs and it is way too confident about shit when it is wrong. Pro-tip, berate the slop machines. They perform better and stop being so god damn sycophantic when you do. I am a divine being of consciousness and considerable skill, and it is a slop machine: useful, but beneath me.
I mean having an LLM is helpful for writing left/right code, but I would quit if that was a decent portion of my job.
Isn’t modular code used to handle repetitive mundane bits?
- Yes. People seem to be writing bad poorly abstracted code these days. Leading them to assume there’s a lot of manual mundane tasks
And most devs I know use it everyday, so... 🤷
Especially for repetitive mundane code, like they said. It's much faster to check code for correctness than it is to write it in the first place.
"I need to restructure this directory tree. If a file has "index" in the name, then it has to go in a parallel directory structure starting at "/home/repos/project/indexes/" and remove the word "index" from the name. Use the same child folders as the original."
There, I just finished a custom Python script to accomplish that. Can I do it myself? Yes. Can I do it in 30 seconds? No. Why would I waste my time writing such a mundane script for a one-off thing? And it can do so much more.
- It's much faster to check code for correctness than it is to write it in the first place.
  In certain circumstances sure, but at any level of complexity, not so much.
  At some point it becomes less about code correctness and more about logical correctness, which requires contextual domain understanding.
  Want to churn out directory changing python scripts, go nuts.
  Want to add business logic that isn't a single discrete change to an existing system, less likely.
  For small things is works OK, it's less useful the more complex the task.
- This is what LSPs are for, or even like just a baseline knowledge of CLI tooling (honestly, like, just mv and sed).
  You do not need an LLM for any of what you’ve described, and I would argue that I can probably do it faster by hand than you can prompt your LLM and debug the slop it hands you back.
- Now re-explain this 5 more times before it shits out something remotely close to what you're asking it to do.
- everyday
  "every day", if you mean 'daily'.

I’m guessing it’s because he’s a prick. That’s it, isn’t it?

CEO
Prick
Yup
Good excuse to lay off without paying unemployment while power-tripping. That's all these kinds of things usually are about.
LLMs for code completion cause me more button presses and clicks to ignore them over standard code completion and the chat doesn't help people who think logically and conceptually only ones who think verbally. So, it's useless to me.
- Good excuse to lay off without paying unemployment while power-tripping. That’s all these kinds of things usually are about.
  You know who will be the slowest to adopt any Ai assistance? Senior devs. You know who this guy just fired? Senior devs. If you want to know the people you never want to fire, I have news for you.
- Extremely doubtful that this would rise to a firing that was justified enough that would preclude the employees seeking unemployment. They would really want to have a longer paper trail than "CEO sent a slack message and then a meeting a week later." Not saying that this was an illegal firing. This was just power tripping.

Reminder that Coinbase is the company securing the assets of the majority of government sanctioned/registered crypto ETFs. If you are invested or thinking about being invested in cryptocurrency, but have doubts about the ability of Coinbase to do things in a secure, competent way, consider self custody instead of trusting them.