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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

If I had money entrusted to Coinbase, I'd be concerned about:

1. The idea of them using AI coding tools in a forced way like this. (Meticulous code quality, and perfect understanding of every detail, are critical.)

2. The culture implications of insta-firing someone whose explanation you didn't like, for why they hadn't started using AI tools yet.

3. Scheduling the firing call for a Saturday. Are they in some kind of whip-cracking forced march, and staff going to be fatigued and stressed and sick and making mistakes?

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4. He probably fired the best engineers who were concerned that a financial application actually works correctly instead of toying and vibing around with Copilot.

Yes, this is probably right.

Going to agree somewhat with the sibling comment on this: (2) & (3) are of significantly greater concern here than (1).

Sure, code quality is important everywhere, & even moreso in finance, but if you're going through this world believing the mean standard across financial tech is high, even before considering the likely rot of coin-brained companies on their engineer's standards, then you need to readjust your skepticism.

On the other hand, the cultural implication of feeling my superiors even have any level of granular interest in monitoring the individual tools I personally use to generate outputs that benefit the company... outside of obvious security/endpoint concerns, there's no world in which that's an environment conductive to quality.

> Meticulous code quality, and perfect understanding of every detail

I'm sorry but there's just no fucking way. Even before AI these crypto coins companies were absolute clown factories. There's no way they ever had it.

While I think that's probably true for many of them, Coinbase is the most prominent crypto company, obviously a major target, and yet we haven't seen any real meaningful hacks of them. I think that says something.

> I think that says something.

I've worked on the triaging side of large corporate bug bounty programmes & trust me when I say that security-by-obscurity is far more impactful in keeping our world (incidentally) secure than any active measure. Absence of exploit does not equal absence of vulnerability.

I think it's unfair to say that Coinbase has effectively "gotten lucky" in not being hacked. Security by obscurity makes sense when you have a low traffic low stakes site, but a place like Coinbase can't rely on that. They are a huge target, they have to take into account the possibility of disgruntled/bribed ex-or-current-employees abusing their knowledge of CB's security systems. They host coins like Monero and others which can obscure where the money is sent.

I'd describe myself as a crypto "true believer" - but have been mostly quiet about that since ~2014. That was about the time I interviewed at a couple of startup exchanges. That was enough for me to realize that none of the exchanges that were popular at that time at least were anywhere near "professional".

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