Coinbase CEO Fires Engineers for Not Adopting AI Tools, Sparking Debate on AI Integration in Tech Companies

Coinbase CEO explains why he fired engineers who didn't try AI immediately | TechCrunch

It's hard to find programmers these days who aren't using AI coding assistants in some capacity, especially to write the repetitive, mundane bits. But those who refused to try the tools when Coinbase bought enterprise licenses for GitHub Copilot and Cursor got promptly fired, CEO Brian Armstrong said this week on John Collison's podcast "Cheeky Pint." (Collison is the co-founder and president of the payments company Stripe.) After getting licenses to cover every engineer, some at the cryptocurrency exchange warned Armstrong that adoption would be slow, predicting it would take months to get even half the engineers using AI. Armstrong was shocked at the thought. "I went rogue," he said, and posted a mandate in the company's main engineering Slack channel. "I said, 'AI is important. We need you to all learn it and at least onboard. You don't have to use it every day yet until we do some training, but at least onboard by the end of the week. And if not, I'm hosting a meeting on Saturday with everybody who hasn't done it and I'd like to meet with you to understand why.'" At the meeting, some people had reasonable explanations for not getting their AI assistant accounts set up during the week, like being on vacation, Armstrong said. "I jumped on this call on Saturday and there were a couple people that had not done it. Some of them had a good reason, because they were just getting back from some trip or something, and some of them didn't [have a good reason]. And they got fired." Armstrong admits that it was a "heavy-handed approach" and there were people in the company who "didn't like it." While it doesn't sound like very many people were fired, Armstrong said it sent a clear message that AI is not optional. Still, everything about that story is wild: that there were engineers who wouldn't spend a few minutes of their week signing up for and testing the AI assistant - the most hyped tech for coders ever - and that Armstrong was willing to fire them over it. Coinbase did not respond to a request for comment. Since then, Armstrong has leaned further into the training. He said the company hosts monthly meetings where teams who have mastered creative ways to use AI share what they have learned. Interestingly, Collison, who has been programming since childhood, questioned how much companies should be relying on AI-generated code. "It's clear that it is very helpful to have AI helping you write code. It's not clear how you run an AI-coded code base," he commented. Armstrong replied, "I agree." Indeed, as TechCrunch previously reported, a former OpenAI engineer described that company's central code repository as "a bit of a dumping ground." The engineer said management had begun dedicating engineering resources to improve the situation.

Coinbase's CEO Fired Software Engineers Who Didn't Adopt AI Tools: 'We're Leaning as Hard as We Can Into AI'

The CEO of $77.4 billion cryptocurrency platform Coinbase enforced a recent AI push by firing employees who failed to onboard with new AI tools by a strict deadline. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong told the "Cheeky Pint" podcast earlier this week that he showed his staff how serious he was about AI adoption at the company. Armstrong said he "mandated" the use of AI coding tools internally earlier this year, and Coinbase employees told him that it would take up to six months to get 50% of the software engineers on staff to use the AI tools. But Armstrong decided to accelerate that timeline. Related: The Fastest-Growing Startup Ever Just Surpassed $500 Million in Annual Revenue. Here's Why It Keeps Growing, According to Its CEO. He told software engineers to learn the AI tools by the end of the workweek. They didn't have to use the tools every day; just get familiar with them. Engineers who failed to onboard had to meet with Armstrong on a Saturday to explain why they hadn't. Those without a good reason were fired. "I jumped on this call on Saturday, and there were a couple of people who had not done it," Armstrong said on the podcast. "Some of them had a good reason, because they were just getting back from some trip or something, and some of them didn't, and they got fired." It's unclear how many employees were fired out of Coinbase's 4,200-person workforce. Armstrong said that the firings were related to a broader push to use AI. "Like a lot of companies, we're leaning as hard as we can into AI," Armstrong said on the podcast. "We made a big push to get every engineer on Cursor and Copilot," he added, referring to two popular AI coding tools that generate code from prompts, edit code, and debug programs. Armstrong mentioned that though some employees didn't like his "heavy-handed approach," it set the tone and provided clarity about the company's priorities. Now 33% of Coinbase's code is written by AI, with the goal of hitting 50% by the end of the quarter in September, he said. Related: Perplexity CEO Says AI Coding Tools Cut Work Time From 'Four Days to Literally One Hour' Other companies are also generating comparable amounts of code with AI. Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated in April that Google is using AI to write "well over 30%" of all new code at the company, while Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stated in the same month that AI generates 20% to 30% of new code at Microsoft. Many companies in the U.S. are mandating that employees use AI tools. Perplexity, an AI search engine startup valued at $14 billion, made it "compulsory" for engineers to use Cursor or Copilot earlier this year, and saw measurable outcomes. CEO Aravind Srinivas told Y Combinator last month that the AI tools reduced "experimentation time" from "three, four days to literally one hour." "That level of change is incredible," Srinivas stated.