Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 842 posts

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#431

Post by lezojeda »

butterlesstoast wrote: post #158
azinman2 wrote: post #136

"Non-technical teams are now shipping production code" Boy that's scary for a company that's effectively fintech...

I respected the "No Pure Managers" part. That's similar to what happened at our org. The question remains, if there are no pure managers, then is this CSM / Sales shipping production code? If yes, then it's indeed scary... > No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.

[dead]

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#432

Post by pron »

atonse wrote: post #366
pron wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if the trend doesn't continue? I understand that a company with Coinbase's performance has little to lose and not many options, but many companies are in a better position. The problem is that executives could take the 15-20% productivity boost and be content, but they read stuff like this, get greedy, and they don't understand the risk they're taking.

Even if the trend doesn’t continue, the current models are very very good. They’re better than the average programmer in the industry, already.

I don't know how anyone who carefully and closely reviews their output could possibly think that. Much of the time their code is fine, but every now and again they make a catastrophic (though often well-hidden) mistake that is so bad that all the tests pass but the codebase will be bricked if enough of those go in. They make such disastrous mistakes frequently enough that a decent-sized codebase can't last for more than 18-24 months.

If the average programmer is this bad, then there must be better-than-average programmers reviewing the code. The problem with agents is that they can produce code at a far higher volume than the average programmer.

Anyway, I don't know how well the average programmer programs, but if you commit agent-generated code without careful review, your codebase will be cooked in a year or two.

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#433

Post by CityOfThrowaway »

Terr_ wrote: post #281
CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's obviously not. There is nothing about being old that prevents you from being AI-native.

Hold up, even before discussing the word "native", there's a weird logical-disconnect between the above two comments. I think paraphrasing is the simplest way to illustrate: {1} scottlamb: "I suspect their lofty stated goal of X is a lie, to disguise their true goal of Y, which is something common which companies find much easier and more-desirable." {2} CityOfThrowaway: "You are wrong, because it's obvious that X is…

Sure, but we're talking about Coinbase, which is a relatively young company not staffed with a bunch of old people in the first place.

It's totally random to accuse them of using "AI-native" to fire old people.

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#434

Post by blharr »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #392
machomaster wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Analogies have to make sense, to be applicable. In this case it doesn't. E.g. you can't just spew nonsense like "let's work together like a bee hive, everything for the Queen/CEO, no matter the personal cost to an individual" without others pointing out the stupidity of comparing humans with bees. You can't just come up with a desirable adjective and start coming up with random scenarios in which those characteristic…

It makes plenty of sense. Player-coaches are a real thing, and in a realm where you're not worried about peak fitness then it's reasonable to demand the coaches become player-coaches.

Player-coaches are a real thing, but noticeable because of how rare and unusual they are. The problem is that the analogy doesn't even hold up in the source its referring to.

Sure, there are good player-coaches, but there are also great pure leaders. There are also very bad player-coaches. A coach who is trying too hard and too deep to be a player when they are less "fit" (or skilled) has historically led to many problems in many cases

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#435

Post by pron »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #374
pron wrote: post #310

> 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 am an engineer. I hire other engineers. I run a company that ships usable software for small businesses. We do this every day. I'm sorry to say, we are indeed shipping in days what used to take weeks.

The only way you could possibly know that is if you're reviewing the code, which means you're not "managing fleets of agents". If you're not reviewing the code (and you wouldn't be if you're managing fleets of agents), then you have no way to tell what you're shipping.

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#436

Post by CityOfThrowaway »

ryandrake wrote: post #279
CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's obviously not. There is nothing about being old that prevents you from being AI-native.

I don't even know what "AI-native" even means. The term is sufficiently vague to shield any number of discrimination schemes.

It's a term of art that straightforwardly means people who embrace AI-assisted programming. As opposed to the very large number of engineers who actively don't like it, or have enough change aversion to have avoided it.

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#437

Post by blharr »

smrtinsert wrote: post #361
wiseowise wrote: post #41

> - No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams. 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 bio…

Can I push to production anytime I want? I can run 10000 agents then no problem. I'll just move fast and break things and I'll get massive cheers because its AI.

You joke, but in a way this is the natural trajectory technology has been heading. AI has just increased the magnitude of it

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#438

Post by pron »

qingcharles wrote: post #397
pron wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe a year ago? Right now the LLMs I mainly use (GPT5.5, Opus 4.7) will intuit exactly what I need from my brief specs and universally go above-and-beyond in creating code that is not only extremely high-quality, but catches a ton of the gotchas I would have stumbled on, in advance. Just a minute ago 5.5 looked at some human-written code of mine from last year and while it was making the changes I asked for it dete…

I use GPT 5.5. Sometimes it does what you say. It certainly finds silly mistakes in my code better than I could. But frequently enough it makes catastrophic architectural mistakes in its own code.

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#439

Post by SkyPuncher »

pron wrote: post #310

> 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…

Yes, it can. I do this regularly.

I have literally built and shipped multiple things that would have taken me many many months to do and I’ve done it in under a week.

Many of these are LLM heavy features where the LLM can literally self-evaluate and self-optimize. I start with a general feature, it will generate adverse, synthetic data, it will build a feature, optimize it the figure out new places to improve. 1 year ago, this would have taken an entire team months to do, now, it’s 2 or 3 days of work.

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#440

Post by grogenaut »

dwd wrote: post #413
cloche wrote: post #87

Earlier 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…

The only successful Player-Coach that comes to mind was Eric Cantona as player-manager of the France national beach soccer team after leaving Manchester United aged 30. He won the 2004 Euro Championship, the 2005 FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup along with a number of top 4 places over his 15 years as player and/or coach.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Rose
Post reply on HN