Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko is a big fan of agentic coding

The rise of agentic coding tools has been a major change for software engineers across the industry, but for Anatoly Yakovenko, CEO of Solana Labs, it seems to have arrived particularly hard. Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt, Yakovenko said he is increasingly comfortable taking a back seat on software development tasks.

“AI has been a big force multiplier for someone who is an expert,” says Yakovenko, describing his experience with agentic coding after more than 15 years of software development. “Now I can just see Claude rushing through his thing and I can almost smell it going off the rails.”

“If people are talking to me and I’m not paying attention,” he continued, “it’s because I’m looking at Claude.”

Co-founder of the Solana cryptocurrency protocol, Yakovenko has seen tremendous success this year even as many cryptocurrencies have struggled. The system has announced $2.85 billion in annual revenue earlier this month, largely fueled by crypto trading platforms. Even more impressive was the Solana coin’s first exchange-traded fund (or ETF), which was launched the day before Yakovenko took the stage. The fund was launched by the crypto asset manager Bitwise nearly $70 million in inflows in one day.

On stage, Yakovenko attributed the success to growing acceptance of crypto, especially from the conventional financial sector. “If you’re a back-office finance person, you actually get crypto much, much faster,” Yakovenko said. “Finances are constantly dealing with settlement risks. They are constantly dealing with banking risks.”

During the same period, cryptocurrency has received significant new criticism for enabling public bribery, especially in connection with the Solana-hosted Trumpcoin. The currency has led an estimated $350 million to the presidentwhat critics see as a form of bribery – especially in the wake of Trump’s high-profile pardon of Tron founder Justin Sun and Founder of Binance Changpeng Zhao.

But as long as Solana is an open protocol, Yakovenko has little control over the coins it hosts. “I could send you an email with a link to Trumpcoin or Fartcoin,” Yakovenko explained on stage, “and both are protocols, both the email and the underlying protocol that creates that market.”