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> What happened to the days when a dedicated manager would manage 8 reports?

Cheap money went away which caused companies to start asking hard questions about productivity and how much those dedicated managers were contributing.

As a data point, I work at a US company that ended up in this place and the same thing is happening.

In my BU there were directors with 2 direct reports. Even at the next level up, the number of non-IC directs is only high single digits. There are many managers who were already engaging technically with the product (not PRs but playing an active role in planning work) and they have no idea what directors are actually doing...aside from attending meetings with other directors.

Almost all decision-making capacity has been moved outside of teams which has resulted in almost no actual work (because everything needs to be cleared by someone with no engagement with product) and people leaving (because promo decisions are made by people who have no idea what anyone is contributing, the worst ICs are the only ones they can retain ofc).

It is a terrible environment to work in.

I don't necessarily think the manager should be best IC but definitely someone who is genuinely talented with sufficient scope and responsibility to make good decisions/add value for ICs. There are way too many passengers today.

Also, this is true of higher-level ICs. At my work, they have no real engagement with product so have influence through ambiguous statements about the general direction that get passed around like the word of God. None of these decisions, so far, have been helpful or relevant.

>> Producing nothing, but for sure making themselves look self-important.

A good manager is worth their worth in gold even if they produce zero technical output. I've had managers that were absolutely instrumental in my career as a programmer, and they did close to zero IC work.

>>Before that the manager was essentially the best engineer in the tea

Yes, and it was absolutely awful. Keep the best engineer in the team as the best engineer on the team. Call them experts, distinguished, senior++, whatever, don't make them managers.

>>Let's go back to what it used to be

God, please don't.

>>We don't need weekly 1:1s to check on feelings.

Speak for yourself please. I find weekly 1:1 extremely important for the entire team, especially in fully remote roles.

This ain't about sports.

In most sports you've retired by the age of 40 and most coaches are older than that. I would say that's the reason it's common in sports, but that's the exception not the rule

If everything is high prio nothing is and if the backlog is always full it's not a problem if it fills up even more. If I am at the assembly line, I am doing my darnedest not to make it run faster. One can only sprint so long.

Who cares? If you're getting laid off, the only thing that really matters is the severance package.

Its all lip service - either AI generated or hand written.

> To get there, we are not just reducing headcount and cutting costs, we’re fundamentally changing how we operate: rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it.

For sure this part screams LLM

I think a lot of LLMs are trained on corporate communications, and since companies have been copying each other for years, it’s hard to tell them apart.

This is just good writing, not a 100% proof of AI being used.

Of course it is. That's the reason it's getting pushed so hard. Their end game ideal would be to get rid of all the developers.

It would be amusing but counterproductive to have a layoff email talk about how they’re firing their best and smartest employees.

Exactly, I think there's actually an advantage to using these tools with a few decades hands on experience. At least, I'm getting satisfactory results and I frequently lean on my experience to prevent AI tools derailing. But it's actually a lot of work as well. More or less a full time job at this point.

Age-ism is reinforced by senior people resisting the notion that they need to change and adapt. I'm not like that (I'm 51). But I'm having a lot of tedious debates with people lately about how they don't want to use AI tools, how their job is somehow special so they can't use it, etc. Many of those people are actually quite a bit younger than me. There definitely is a pattern here of people that are a bit set in their ways not adapting and being a bit stubborn. Age-ism is unfair to people that are actually putting in the work to learn and adapt. But life is unfair.

Nobody actually has more than 6-12 months of experience with agentic coding tools at this point because the tools were pretty much unusable before then. I was using ChatGPT and a few other tools before that for occasionally copy pasting bits of code or figuring out bugs. But that's not really the same thing.

Half a year is not a huge gap to bridge if for whatever reason you are a bit behind on this. So, get on with it. It should not take you that long to catch up. Especially if you are a bit older, the best way to counter age-ism is showing that you have all the skills already.

Same, I've been coding for 40+ years, and other people I know of similar length of time also seem real quick to adopt AI. I'm constantly having to show the young devs how to get the most out of their AI agents and also adapting my workflows regularly as things changes. Weirdly its some of the youngest who are most resistant, I think because they are learning coding skills, and just have got the hang of coding such that they are productive, and AI is coming in and taking that away from them largely, they are still keen to code. While I've enjoyed coding, realistically it's always been the bottleneck in creating software. A lot of the process is about how to effectively manage that bottle neck, now a lot more options are available. Iterating quick, trying different things, experimenting. Much easier to throw something away when you have better ideas.

Except people who are learning to leverage it appropriately already know better than to generate important production code by "managing fleets of agents".

> I am among the oldest on our team and also the most in tune with AI.

Congratulations. But you completely missed my point. I didn't say old people can't be in tune with AI.

> I see AI-native as those who have embraced it

That's not what the word "native" means. In the human language situation I referred to, it's about the language you learned first. It's not a synonym of proficient or fluent. If you learned to code first without AI tools, you are not AI-native by any definition I would understand, no matter how good at using AI you may be.

It's not just "English-native" that makes me think they have this meaning in mind. It's also the term "digital native" that gets thrown around a lot and is absolutely about how old you are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_native

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

"There's nothing about being a non-native English speaker that prevents you from being proficient." This is the comment's point. We're talking about proxies and correlations here, not physical law.

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 achievable... if you define 'native' in a certain way."

{3} Terr_: "Uh, what? That doesn't make sense. The feasibility of X isn't part of Scottlamb's argument. Even if we assume X is possible, it isn't evidence they actually intend X over Y.

To be "AI native" (a la digital native) you have to have grown up with the technology.

I'm not sure exactly which children they're planning to replace all their staff with, nor how they plan to get around the child labour laws.

Everybody had a chance to learn it those year. No one who had already learned to code had a chance to learn it first, as in before other ways of coding. Not everyone can be AI-native.

You might assume they aren't going to be so stupid as to try to exclude everyone who isn't new to programming. I wouldn't. They're a crypto business.

See also "digital native", a popular term which is absolutely about growing up after the technology in question was ubiquitous. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_native

First as in that was the first thing they learned and can't really think in non-ai terms.

> But these LLMs are like Happy Gilmore. They get to the green in one shot then they orbit the hole with an extremely dubious short game.

Except that he got good at his short game by the end. LLMs will get there sooner than we think.

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 improvement overall.

We do not see the weeks to days improvement though. The bottleneck before was testing and reviewing, and they are even bigger bottlenecks now.

What kind of work do you do, and what kind of workflow were you using before and after AI to benefit so much?

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.

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 what might be wrong with the new one.

What's your example?

Shipping garbage.

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

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.

The C compiler was a prime example of an application where the LLM can self-evaluate/optimise, with one of the best set of tests could imagine. Yet the end result was a mess.

I have experienced areas where high productivity can be had without much loss in quality. So I can believe it. But it really depends on what you’re doing and I firmly believe many companies will run out of easy stuff that we can blaze through with AI fairly quickly. At least that’s where we seem to be heading

What's an example of such a thing? Just curious

> If you’re more or less experienced, you can easily see the “good” and “bad” sides of it. So you kinda plan it out in a way that you can “evolve AI generated software”.

If you're truly "managing fleets of agents" there's no way you're able to sift through the good and the bad in the output. If your AI-generated code is evolvable (which is hard to tell right now) then you're not writing it with "fleets of agents". If you are writing it with fleets of agents, I would bet it's not evolvable; you just haven't reached the breaking point yet.

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

What is the difference between supervisor and an architect in tech products area?

> the LLMs will ship code the LLMs understand, and whether any human specifically understands any particular part will mostly not matter.

I find this particularly funny. There were more than a couple Star Trek Episodes where some alien planet depends on some advanced AI or other technology that they no longer understand, and it turns out the AI is actually slowly killing them, making them sterile, etc. (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Bough_Breaks_(Star_Tr... )

Sure, Star Trek is fiction, but "humans rely on a technology that they forget how to make" is a pretty recurrent theme in human history. The FOGBANK saga was pretty recent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank

It just amazes me that people think "Sure, this AI generated code is kinda broken now, but all we need is just more AI code to fix it at some unknowable point in the future because humans won't be able to understand it!"

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.

> 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.

Companies with less than 20 employees aren't federally required to offer COBRA. Companies larger than that are required to offer at least 18 months of coverage. I don't know how large your old company was, but Coinbase is large enough that this offer, rather than being generous, sounds illegal? https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ebsa/about-ebsa/our-a...

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

I read that as they're going to pay the COBRA premiums for 6 months for the laid off employees.

The layoffs being "due to AI" is usually about freeing up the budget to build a couple datacenters and buy GPUs. And they have to layoff 14% of their workforce because they are buying those GPUs at many times the normal price thanks to the zeitgeist.

They aren't saying that they don't know what to do with the AI productivity boost, but rather they think it worth taking a huge productivity hit right now so they can invest in the future. Whether their vision of the future is realistic...

There are diminishing returns to more engineers. Also hiring more is like investing with leverage. You might increase EV but also increase the chance of going bust if things go poorly.

Reading only the parts of the post that are not about AI does not instill the sense that Mr Armstrong is the kind of person who would hesitate to say that people are let go because the company wants/needs to save money.

This assumes they had a deficit of engineers pre-AI. What if they had as much as they needed?

At this point, I truly do not believe there is anything that could happen that would convince HN that LLMs reduce demand for engineering labor hours.

Yeah, but imagine if he had said that AI was the reason, and how wrong he would have been if he had said that.

I was logged in when I read your comment, so I flicked over to the tab to see what they have. There is a whole "Predict" section of the site I'd not looked at before with sports betting, elections, commodities etc.

Very curious why they haven’t diversified into real world assets. It seems like an obvious move, even if the margins would be lower than their fee business (~85% margins!!).

They’ve added tokens and altcoins to the platform, but I don’t think that’s a particularly strong long-term bet.

Have they not? When I log in, I'm given the option to trade (apparently stocks, futures, commodities) and predict (via Kalshi, I think).

Go on, spill some more tea..

Are any of these fields hiring?

- big institutional allocators

- activists

- the sellside

- guys managing their private market allocations

Marketing team can vibe out PRs that engineers have to review and then shepherd out to production?

Sounds tight I love the direction industry is heading lol.

To be fair marketing vibing content pages is different from managers vibing code that powers a trading app for example.

You just invented CMS.

How’s this actually going? I’m sure there are issues, but is it actually fruitful?

I'm sure a lot of companies are doing that as described (mine too), but I have never in my life heard someone classify website/blog/landing page changes as "production code".

I'm very much pro-AI but I'd quit your tech team on the spot if I were asked to review those.

Having skills is not the same as be required to use them. If your manager is an IC he does not have the time to manage you. He will be trading off quality of his deliverables for your management. No rational person would opt to get fired.

Exactly, it's too easy to overlook the balancing that good middle managers do.

Your comment reminded me that this still happens in the NBA. At 43 years old, Udonis Haslem seldom played minutes towards the end of his 20 year career with the Heat. But they kept him on as a “player-coach,” in that he was a mentor to the younger players and assisted in their coaching. Kyle Lowry is another current example of this “player-coach” role, currently on the Sixers.

It’s funny when bunch of nerds try to mask the fact they have know idea what they’re doing by some lame allegory to sports, military, or some other discipline supposedly more manly and rugger than girly (yugh) math, logic and programming.

“We at the coding company LovelyBeeBunny should be like the samurai’s of the old, willing to pull our swords to die for emperor…” etc. And it is always riddled with complete misunderstanding of the analogous subject, whether sports, history, or warfare.

I'm not sure the professional sports analogies carry over very well.

With very rare exceptions, professional athletes are just not as good athletically at 40/50 as they were at 20. They may be smarter in some ways--which maybe means they'd be better as coaches.

I'm not sure this carries over well to engineering unless you mean that the young people are willing to grind for a lot more hours on nights and weekends.

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.

Reminds me of how kings used to (I think, I'm bad at history) actually fight the battles themselves. Now the head of state, the head of government and the other top people don't fight themselves. Even the admirals only plan and command, AFAIK.

Yeah. I'd agree with this if it were tech leads that were mostly just IC leaders.

But managers should mostly be about two things IMHO:

> Facilitating for ICs.

> COACHING. To elevate ICs and help propagate the desired "culture".

I think Netflix started the sports team analogy for their hiring (and firing). But they don't put forth a "you're a part of the Netflix family". They're open about the work culture you're going to be stepping into.

And I don't think they're trying this thing that Coinbase is trying either.

Player coaches would be redundant given that most sports already have captains, wouldn't they?

Lebron James

In sports like Football where CTE is king, there's just not gonna be enough qualified personnel to coach.

Even better, as an exchange, they don't even necessarily care whether the line goes up, down, sideways, or in fucking circles to quote the Wolf of Wall Street. As long as it goes somewhere, and customers are charged fees.

Ironically, if they adopted a Wall St boiler room culture instead of masquerading as an innovative tech company they'd probably be doing a lot better.

I fail to see how this is specific to a crypto company. You’re drawing a correlation that’s not backed up by any empirical evidence.

The GP post describes a common problem in _most_ workplaces in the market today. It’s not specific to crypto, AI, or anything in between.

I see $667M loss numbers in the press, but I also see a positive P/E ratio? How does that work?

Edit: it’s because the loss is an accounting loss due to mark to market adjustment, while the company is operationally profitable.

I assume that’s still no great, but not nearly as dire as the reported loss suggests, and not a sign of a dying company.

The thing is that the former crypto gamblers have moved on to gamble in the prediction markets like Polymarket now. Not sure if COIN is coming back from this.

Almost every "AI washing", except for the firms that are spending massively on data center capex (Microsoft, Meta), is coming from a company that is hurting.

The macro is not great right now. The world economy is on a razor's edge. If things unwind, we could all be in for a world of economic hurt. There aren't many levers to pull us out this time around, either.

Crypto is in an even worse state. Investors want liquidity for the uncertainty. Plus there's the looming Q-day that keeps getting pushed earlier and earlier by the experts while we're also inching nearer and nearer on the clock.

what is happening to crypto that is causing this? I was thinking with the recent conflicts crypto would thrive, if anything.

That is bonkers but I will enjoy calling my friends “biological units” from now on

This is sickening. People that don't realise that companies are made of people are in for a surprise. Once they go public, they forget that, and it shows.

A company_is_ the sum of its people, their talents and aligned behind a mission statement.

This is so far misguided, I can't help but think this 'biological unit' of a founder won't last long.

There’s also Yanis Varoufakis’ recent book, Technofeudalism.

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 characteristics may occur. "Let's make the company strong as a gorilla, big as an elephant, smart as Von Neumann, bright as a Sun, as courageous as young guys from youtube fails compilations." This makes no sense whatsoever.

Unions can't fix the fact that crypto didn't survive it's first real Flight to Quality and is suffering against gold.

I mean it doesn't really help the analogy when most of the examples in the Wikipedia link mention how it's either not done anymore for that sport or very rare nowadays.

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

Brian Armstrong is still a billionaire. So it's not like he lacks alternatives to destroying people's lives.

What a sad way to think about other people

Absolutely hilarious to optimize for having employees with no discernible edge whatsoever.

[dead]

No problem if you split the gains 50-50. 2.5x raise for the one person.

The profit from the employee reduction goes to the capitalists not to labor. So it is in the best interest of workers to resist reductions in the number of workers.

delusions of having AI do those roles and the one person in charge over prompting will know the difference between quality and slop... guess which one I'm betting on?

> health insurance were de-linked from employment most people would flee the job market

That would be visible in all major markets outside of the US, no?

At that number I’d argue what you’re doing is not management. It’s basically “you’re the guy who fires people in this group”. For some companies, that’s fine, but those people will essentially never have your ear, and you’ll only have theirs in group settings.

Span of control is quite different from direct report.

I've seen more than one pitch for knowledge products for "AI-enhanced managers", which are basically prompt templates that enable you to slop your way through 1:1s, ceremonies and reviews.

What would you blame instead?

The kinds of people who really can do all three always have options. It means you end up with a lot of turnover in these types of teams.

What is the alternative

Direct link https://xcancel.com/brian_armstrong/status/20516167591451857...

I've strongly disliked every team where this was the case. The people in those positions ended up being neither good managers nor good engineers.

YMMV, I suppose, but this combined with the AI nonsense just makes the dislike even harder.

Can anyone think of a single successful player-coach in the entire history of sports? Why would this be a good model?

Gotta be fun being a strong and active IC with 15 direct reports.

> 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.

This has always been the case where I work, long before AI.

what a weird thing to emulate. player coaching is super rare and there were very few good ones in the last 40 years.

why not, managers should be like left handed specialist relievers, they come in for a short time to handle a specific issue and otherwise let the team alone

No pure managers is a shitty situation where anything people related is an after thought. That’s how you end up with a shoddy crew with a revolving door.

[dead]

IMO managers (and directors) should staff the large incident management rotation. Helping to coordinate response, freeing up ICs to debug and fix.

I ran content and educational pages for Kraken a few years ago. This was just as AI was getting useful. I was told by the head of security, the guy who coded all the original software, not to use any outside AI tools to proofread or edit. Then, a few months in, the CEO, Jesse Powell, asked why we were so slow in producing content - we had to edit it all by hand, as you do. We explained the security issues and he said "Who cares, just use it."

So on one hand they are the most secure business on the Internet and on the other hand YOLO!

Internal tools and help/marketing pages aren't generally considered production code.

> As long as their access is segregated from the actual critical stuff.

Do fintech customers share your ideals as to what is "critical stuff" and what isn't? How much of this business could _plausibly_ be "non critical?"

What are the top alternatives? (And are they doing the same thing?)

Maybe I won't have to be concerned about job security some years from now, when everything becomes FUBAR and companies will need a legacy systems expert/software necromancer to a) discover, spec and re-formalize what their machine-generated black boxes are doing; b) build comprehensible and maintainable systems; and c) be responsible for what happens in the process aka swear by my work. While (a) probably can be done by a machine alone, and (b) can be done by a machine-and-human tandem, (c) absolutely requires a human.

But the few years to come are going to be wild for a lot of folks out there.

I don't expect Coinbase to publish a "we're hiring everyone back" in 5 years from now, but I hope at some point media will spot those trends as they'll - I have no doubts - will happen, and propagate that tune.

I realise you're joking, but crypto is now a heavily regulated industry, the KYC/AML requirements are no-joke and non-compliance will get the company's licences in a given country/state terminated.

For the end user it looks like an evil cash-grab, but really it's the company protecting itself from regulatory vengeance.

As an American, I’d point out that there are structural reasons the U.S. often outpaces Europe in certain areas of innovation and business, tech and otherwise. Labor regulations in many European countries make it harder to reallocate talent quickly, which can slow down company formation and scaling.

That doesn’t make one model universally better. There are clear tradeoffs on both sides. But it is part of the equation worth considering in response to your point.

"If you've worked for us for 24 months and we fire you, we'll pay you for 29 months and give you your next equity and pay for your insurance for 6 months" and "if we fire you we'll pay you an extra ~21% (plus your next equity and another month of insurance too) of whatever you earned" does indeed sound quite nice considering that a vast majority people who are terminated get nothing or next to nothing.

It'd be looking a gift horse in the mouth to whine about "well they get 22+% at XYZ"

As a European you're on a third as much though in the first place.

I'm not from the US, but from eastern europe. I have not been in collectives where what you're saying was true. At most I've seen 2-3 months of pay for someone to sign their own resignation.

When I got laid off I got 0. The company I currently work for generally gives 0 severance as well. 5 months is extremely generous

> as European I would say this is fairly standard

I must live in a different Europe then. I'd say this would be EXTREMELY generous for Europe.

This: User just tricked Grok and Bankrbot to send tokens with Morse code

https://www.cryptopolitan.com/user-tricked-grok-bankrbot-to-...

They'll have to reduce these 1:1s and any formal meetings to a minimum (e.g. once a quarter), and deal less with career growth and people conflicts.

They'll switch to async communications for everything, and ideally have a bot that answers Mm-humm like a psychologist on his chair.

More seriously, the solution is to move to a flatter org, but that's a drastic change with unknown consequences for most companies.

"IC work" seems to have evolved at Coinbase to mean "supervise AI changes". Then the question becomes how will managers actually review these changes and not just press accept at 3:50.

I assume they will have absurd metrics, like number of commits and token use to,determine how good of an IC you are. So, you start a bunch of agents in the background, merge their PRs without review, while having 1:1 and other meetings with your team. Productivity they call it

I've been using Linux as my desktop for years - I've yet to spend any crypto...

At least there’s positives there…

Nah, they are adults. Labor should make way more decisions, but they knew what they were doing and for who.

It's better to do a hiring freeze before the RIF. Otherwise people have left jobs to come work for you and are now stranded.

Perhaps try to space out hiring and firing a bit more

You know, hire, stop hiring, then start firing

you don't even get a severance that way. People moved for a job, then got stranded without even getting a first paycheck.

Very early in the first Bitcoin boom cycle I had a friend who was into it, so I opened a Coinbase account because I thought it'd be funny to pay him the $15 I owed him for lunch or whatever in Bitcoin. I bought the $15 on a credit card, sent it to his wallet, we had our laughs about it, and I moved on. Years later, after it became clear that the only purpose of cryptocurrencies is scams & crime, I went to close my Coinbase account just for some basic digital hygiene. Except I found out that now, they only let you log in if you have an external bank account associated with your Coinbase account. And you can't delete your account without logging in. And there's no way in hell I'm associating my real bank account with a scam & crime agency. So I'm stuck with a Coinbase account I can't close or even log in to. Lol.

Closing mine today

Reckless behavior? In my crypto currency? It's impossible!

Not like it ever stopped the crypto industry before, if we're being honest

Frontend has plenty of security considerations.

You are a npm import away from having big problems.

It is weird to read this considering they should have enough money to employ enough software engineers.

Why would non-programmers need to ship production code in a financial context?

This goes for everyone.

Some of the biggest AI adopting companies are still shipping garbage (Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, etc), and I’m desperately curious what infinite AI resources are actually doing for them.

More reports for accounting? What?

I suppose not getting a layoff email and instead getting it delivered face to face would be more human, but that's American capitalism for you in all its glory

"As the CEO responsible for the asinine decisions that got us here, I am stepping down immediately, without severance."

No, because you're misunderstanding how this works.

Technical teams still need to design and build out the infra.

Technical teams still need to think about how to design and secure the backend systems.

The only thing that changes is that non technical people can now build UIs and internal tools on top of your core assuming you have solid APIs, MCPs, docs, and components to build on top of.

If you're allowing non-technical teams deploy mission critical software then you're not doing it right.

No one wakes up the frontend dude at 2am because the JS is doing something weird in the browser... All of the core infra and backend should still belong to technical teams.

I'm sure Coinbase understands this and when they say non-technical people are shipping software they don't mean they're vibe coding terraform infra and deploying full-stack user-facing applications.