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

Nowadays it is difficult to find programmers who do not use AI coding assistants in a certain capacity, especially to write the repetitive, everyday bits.

But those who refused to try the tools when Coinbase Enterprise licenses bought for Github Copilot and cursor was immediately fired, said CEO Brian Armstrong this week on John Collison’s podcast “Brutal pint.” (Collison is co-founder and president of the payment company Stripe.)

After they received licenses to cover every engineer, some warned in the cryptocurrency Exchange Armstrong that the adoption would be slow, predicting it would take months to get even half of the engineers who use AI.

Armstrong was shocked by the thought. “I went Rogue,” he said, and placed a mandate in the most important technical weak channel of the company. “I said:” Ai is important. We need you to learn it all and at least on board. You don’t have to use it every day until we follow some training, but at least at the end of the week on board. And if not, then I organize a meeting on Saturday with everyone who did not do it and I would like to understand why. ” ‘

During the meeting, some people had reasonable explanations not to set up their AI assistant accounts during the week, as are on vacation, said Armstrong.

“I jumped on this call on Saturday and there were a few people who hadn’t done it. Some of them had a good reason because they had just returned from a trip or something, and some of them not [have a good reason]. And they were fired. “

Armstrong admits that it was a “harsh approach” and there were people in the company who ‘didn’t like it’.

Although it doesn’t sound like a lot of people were being fired, Armstrong said it sent a clear message that AI is not optional. Yet everything about that story is wild: that there were engineers who would not spend a few minutes of their week with registering and testing the AI ​​assistant – the most hyped technology for coder ever – and that Armstrong was willing to shoot over it.

Coinbase did not respond to a request for comment.

Since then, Armstrong has leaned further in the training. He said that the company is organizing monthly meetings where teams that have creative ways master to use AI share what they have learned.

Interesting that Collison, who has been Programming since childhoodWondered how many companies should rely on code generated by AI.

“It is clear that it is very useful to help AI to help you write code. It is not clear how to perform an AI-Cod basic,” he noticed. Armstrong replied, “I agree.”

Indeed, as WAN reported earlier, a former OpenAi engineer described the central code repository of that company as ‘a bit of a landfill’. The engineer said that management had started devoting technical means to improve the situation.

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