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.
Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
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Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
#352> 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…
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…
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
Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
#353> 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
Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
It's not about caring how it works. It's about caring that it keeps working at all even after you add stuff to it for a year or three (and nearly all software written by companies is software they evolve).
And who’s to say it won’t? It’s working now. I’m adding stuff and it’s still working. Why won’t that continue in year 3?
Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you buy into it being regulatory, you've already bought into the fraud. They're often delaying weeks to months to actually look into whatever set their hair trigger. That's not regulatory compliance, that's increasing your float. Especially in cases such as "all we needed was an updated passport check while you do the Macarena." The regulatory bit just provides the cover for the operation, the fact that it's true…
So you are accusing them of fraud without any evidence.
The level of unwitting irony here is off the charts.
Just one rebuttal ago, it was explained why it was okay to freeze customer funds without providing any evidence.
Now we are Jekyll and Hyde'ing back to getting upset about an accusation without evidence. That was a crux of my entire case! I am being damned, for allegedly, using the same standard of evidence as my accuser (though I dispute I am presenting as little as them)!
If that's your case, then you have concluded and rested my case for me in my favor. The entire KYC/AML argument falls apart because it fails your requirement to present evidence at accusation.
Either accusation without present evidence bad, in which case KYC/AML as it is used in stalling people for weeks to months without providing evidence totally falls apart and I rest my case -- or -- that standard of evidence is OK in which I've at least presented as much or more evidence as fintechs provide in their accusation against customers (nothing) and in that instance I also rest my case.
Whichever of these last two Jekyll and Hyde responses we pick, it isn't working against me.
Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Certainly not, I don’t think anyone would make that claim, seems a bit silly.
The benefits of unionization extend beyond this particular situation or company.
They can help shift the balance of power back to the employee and help them guard against being squeezed by their employer to produce more or take on more work for less benefits or compensation.
American tech workers have been fortunate to avoid such aggressive practices, but working conditions will only deteriorate from here, with workers crushed between LLMs and offshoring.
Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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
If the code is really simple, it's cheap to read it. When people don't read it (and when they need to use "fleets of agents"), it's because it's not so simple, and then the people who trust the outcome are those who don't know what it is that they've committed into the codebase. Their logic is no more than: the system hasn't collapsed under the load of 50 (or 500) changes so it probably won't collapse under the load of the next 500 (or 5000). Because that's how engineered systems work, right? If they're fine under light stress, they're fine under heavier stress.
Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
#358To 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.
Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Player coaches would be redundant given that most sports already have captains, wouldn't they?
Captains can't decide to substitute/bench one of their teammates in the middle of a game.
Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not about caring how it works. It's about caring that it keeps working at all even after you add stuff to it for a year or three (and nearly all software written by companies is software they evolve).
And who’s to say it won’t? It’s working now. I’m adding stuff and it’s still working. Why won’t that continue in year 3?
If you carefully read the agent's output you'll see why. It adds layers upon layers of workarounds and defences that hide serious problems, until the codebase reaches a point where the agent can no longer understand it and work with it. All the tests pass right up until the moment when adding a feature or fixing a bug causes another bug, and then nothing and no one can save the codebase anymore.