These days, it is difficult to find a programmer who does not use AI coding helpers in some way, particularly for writing the repetitive, routine parts.
However, CEO Brian Armstrong stated last week on John Collison’s podcast “Cheeky Pint” that Coinbase dismissed workers who refused to test the tools after purchasing corporate licenses for GitHub Copilot and Cursor. (Collison is the president and co-founder of Stripe, a payment company.)
Armstrong was cautioned by some at the Bitcoin exchange that adoption would be difficult after obtaining licenses to cover every engineer. They predicted that it would take months to get even half of the engineers to use AI.
The concept startled Armstrong. He issued a directive on the company’s primary engineering Slack channel and declared, “I went rogue.” “AI is vital,” I stated. All of you must learn it and at least join the team. Until we conduct some training, you are not required to use it daily; however, you must be onboard by the end of the week. If not, I would like to meet with you to find out why, and I am holding a meeting with everyone who has not done it on Saturday.
According to Armstrong, some attendees at the meeting gave valid reasons for not setting up their AI assistant accounts over the week, such as being on vacation.
When I joined this call on Saturday, I discovered that a few individuals had not completed it. While some of them did not [have a valid reason], others did, such as those who were returning from a trip or something. And they were let go.
Armstrong acknowledges that some employees “did not like it” and that it was a “heavy-handed approach.”
Armstrong claimed that even while it may not seem like many people were let go, it made it extremely evident that AI is a must. Nevertheless, that narrative is crazy in every way: Armstrong was prepared to dismiss engineers for not spending a few minutes of their week enrolling in and testing the AI assistant, the most anticipated piece of technology for programmers ever.
A request for response from Coinbase was not answered.
Armstrong has leaned further into the training ever since. According to him, teams that have mastered innovative applications of AI share their knowledge at the company’s monthly meetings.
It is interesting to note that Collison, who has been programming since he was a young child, questioned the extent to which businesses should depend on AI-generated code.
It is obvious that having AI assist you with code writing is incredibly beneficial. How to manage an AI-coded code base is unclear,” he said. “I agree,” Armstrong said in response.
In fact, a former OpenAI engineer called the company’s core code repository “a bit of a dumping site,” as TechCrunch previously reported. According to the engineer, management has started allocating engineering resources to make things better.
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