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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%

#801

Post by adamtaylor_13 »

MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #395
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a software engineer who also hires other software engineers, I’m curious about the disconnect in our experiences. I do systems programming. Before AI feature development roughly went like, design, implement, test, review with some back edges and a lot of time spent in test and review. AI has made the implementation part much faster, at the cost of even more time spent testing and reviewing, though still an improve…

We design and build software systems that our clients' businesses run on. So it's not the product, it's the system that allows them to run their business. Typically, it's less "QuickBooks" and more "Let QuickBooks talk to 10 different systems" and then custom functionality built on that.

It's glue, custom business workflows, and basic web CRUD stuff. We build almost everything on Rails unless there's a critical reason not to (e.g., maintaining an existing system versus building from scratch.)

With very few exceptions our team composition is one senior engineer paired to a business. So we get to avoid a large amount of SDLC busywork which is inter-team communication. This leaves more time for clientengineer communication which has a host of additional benefits. We also build with a "North Star" methodology which keeps everyone, including the client, laser focused on the work at hand.

To answer your final question about how we're benefiting so much from AI, I think it's primarily that we're leaning into it for both implementation, testing, and review. I know it's a sin to let AI review AI, but... it works. I'm actively skeptical of it myself, but our error rate and rework rates don't lie.

And we've got clients in various stages of development and/or long-term support. It's not like we're just hammering a bunch of stuff out and then bouncing. Most of these are multi-year tightly-integrated projects with our clients and we don't see a lack of trust or frustration that you'd expect to see if you were shipping slop. Our Honeybadger errors typically stay at zero, our performance metrics are acceptable across the board, and most importantly our clients love the work we're doing.

I can't think of any other way to measure the quality of what we're doing. And by those metrics, AI has made us better, not worse.

I should write a blog post to outline more of this in detail.

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

#802

Post by adamtaylor_13 »

pron wrote: post #435
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Correct. We do review the code, and we're not managing "fleets of agents". My experience has generally been that the "fleet" approach is not very effective.

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

#803

Post by adamtaylor_13 »

maccard wrote: post #621
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you link to a changelog that shows the 5-10x feature increases? I keep hearing this, but I don’t see anything I use ever actually shipping like this, or people backing this up with any sort of proof.

Our projects are closed source due to our clients owning the code, but I can offer anecdote. We have a client whose business operates on 2-3 very niche SaaS applications in the veterinary/animal medicine space. In a span of about 6 months, we completely ripped out 2 of those 3 and are working on replacing the 3rd one right now. We've done this with a single senior engineer working with the client between 20-40 hours per week with no major regressions. The business has been able to continue working as usual with no disruptions throughout this process.

Obviously it's hard to measure this objectively, but I can't imagine having done this pre-AI with zero downtime and having replaced those SaaS applications in that timeframe.

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

#804

Post by adamtaylor_13 »

grayhatter wrote: post #752
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. I've been searching for months for evidence of this kinda thing. Do you have receipts you can share? Or is it more of the same "just trust me bro"?

I should put together a blog post to share more, but unfortunately it is more "trust me bro" at this stage. You can see a few other comments where I replied: we do have subjective evidence that seems to suggest to me that we're moving much faster than we could've moved in the past.

Of course, it's not just shipping, it's shipping stably in a way that doesn't disrupt the day-to-day operations of the businesses we're working for. One client that comes to mind has 2-3 niche SaaS applications that they used independently for various workloads. We completely replaced 2 of those without any disruptions to their business in about 6 months (no, we did not replace it feature-for-feature; we just built what they needed.)

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

#805

Post by adamtaylor_13 »

willio58 wrote: post #443
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What you are shipping is not the same as what Coinbase is shipping. These are vastly different things. Making a shiny app with AI is great, I'm doing it as I type this. But I am under no delusion that what I make can sustain a multi-million dollar or even billion dollar business in the case of Coinbase. That's plain silly.

I agree with you. I didn't intend to make the argument that what my company does and what Coinbase does are on the same level, if that's what came across.

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

#806

Post by adamtaylor_13 »

globular-toast wrote: post #512
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does what you ship involve hundreds of lines of HTML/CSS by any chance? Do you care about accessibility?

It does indeed. Most of what we build are web applications used internally by our clients (e.g., inside their business, not customer facing.)

Because of that, we don't typically spend a lot of time on accessibility because it's internal facing software. As far as I'm aware, these businesses don't have individuals who need those accommodations. Of course, if that changed, it is something we'd need to consider.

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

#807

Post by adamtaylor_13 »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #562
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Give an example. I have an example in my line of work. Full service rewrite in a new language. Would have taken forever without AI. AI makes it easier, faster. The service has better throughput, uses less machines. Having a complete full test harness that allows us to ensure we are meeting all the functionality of the previous service is key. AND we are keeping the old service on standby because we know we don't know…

From another comment above:

> Our projects are closed source due to our clients owning the code, but I can offer anecdote. We have a client whose business operates on 2-3 very niche SaaS applications in the veterinary/animal medicine space. In a span of about 6 months, we completely ripped out 2 of those 3 and are working on replacing the 3rd one right now. We've done this with a single senior engineer working with the client between 20-40 hours per week with no major regressions. The business has been able to continue working as usual with no disruptions throughout this process.

> Obviously it's hard to measure this objectively, but I can't imagine having done this pre-AI with zero downtime and having replaced those SaaS applications in that timeframe.

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

#808

Post by dahart »

siren2026 wrote: post #754
dahart wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't need weekly 1:1s to check on feelings. As a manager that does weekly 1:1s, I agree with that statement. But I do need 1:1s to check on progress, uncover blockers that people haven’t surfaced on their own, make continuous small decisions, offer support, assess performance, collect status information for my manager, and last but not least give employees the opportunity to share feelings frequently. They do,…

> But I do need 1:1s to check on progress, uncover blockers that people haven’t surfaced on their own. That's why historically having managers being strong IC contributors remove that need because they already KNOW the progress and issues on the field. Modern BigTech created that artificial layer of managers that need to know about all the blockers and progress, just to report it to another layer of managers. That la…

I’m not sure this framing is accurate. Companies have always had management. All large organizations have layered management; the Catholic Church has had layered management for two thousand years; your government has layered management; all militaries have layered management; Bell Telephone and Standard Oil had layered management for a hundred years before computers in business were a thing. This is purely a function of large groups, because communication is necessary to function, and giving FAANG companies credit for it overstates their influence.

Calling it a feature of empire building might be somewhat accurate in the sense that yes all companies and most groups aim to make money, or otherwise grow and succeed. Still, that seems like a pessimistic way to put it. Even small companies and church groups and libraries and PTA associations will have presidents & treasurers. Middle managers appear as soon as group size hits a certain limit.

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

#809

Post by randallsquared »

reverius42 wrote: post #791
randallsquared wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you'd told me 20-30 years ago we'd actually get the Star Trek computer in the mid-2020s and it still wouldn't be actually AGI, I would have thought that very strange and unlikely, so who knows?

> wouldn't be actually AGI Not sure that's going to age well.

Well, I meant existing or previous here in May 2026, though "mid-2020s" could definitely be interpreted to mean 2023-2027 or so.

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

#810

Post by happymellon »

mvc wrote: post #783
happymellon wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been coding for 25 years now, and it's not that I see AI as evil, but more that it doesn't solve any of my problems or looking back, any problems I had at previous roles. It's always been someone higher up the ranking wants meetings, training or something dumb because his golf buddy sold him on Kafka support contracts in inappropriate situations, or an architect needs to shoehorn some tech in so they can have it…

zoom literally makes a summary of meetings available now if you enable it. unfortunately you still have to show up to the meeting and engage with your friends and colleagues for half an hour.

So the one usecase that could be useful is kneecapped.

Why am I not surprised.

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