Coinbase CEO explains why he fired engineers who didn’t try AI immediately

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.