kron

These two things are about the same size "2nm" transistor gate pitch : 42nm Flagellum motor : 45nm

This is an email I sent earlier today to all employees at Coinbase: Team, Today I’ve made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%. I want to walk you through why we're doing this now, what it means for those affected, and how this positions us for the future. Why now Two forces are converging at the same time. We need to be front footed to respond to both. First, the market. Coinbase is well-capitalized, has diversified revenue streams, and is well-positioned to weather any storm. Crypto is also on the verge of the next wave of adoption, with stablecoins, prediction markets, tokenization, and more taking off. However, our business is still volatile from quarter to quarter. While we've managed through that cyclicality many times before and come out stronger on the other side, we’re currently in a down market and need to adjust our cost structure now so that we emerge from this period leaner, faster, and more efficient for our next phase of growth. Second, AI is changing how we work. Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated. The pace of what's possible with a small, focused team has changed dramatically, and it's accelerating every day. All of this has led us to an inflection point, not just for Coinbase, but for every company. The biggest risk now is not taking action. We are adjusting early and deliberately to rebuild Coinbase to be lean, fast, and AI-native. We need to return to the speed and focus of our startup founding, with AI at our core. What this means 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. What does this mean in practice? - Fewer layers, faster decisions: We are flattening our org structure to 5 layers max below CEO/COO. Layers slow things down and create coordination tax. The future is small, high context teams that can move quickly. Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports. Fewer layers also means a leaner cost structure that is built to perform through all market cycles. - 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. - AI-native pods: We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact. We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role. In short: AI is bringing a profound shift in how companies operate, and we’re reshaping Coinbase to lead in this new era. This is a new way of working, and we need to leverage AI across every facet of our jobs. To those who are affected I know there are real people behind these decisions — talented colleagues who have poured themselves into this company and our mission. To those of you who will be leaving: thank you. You’ve helped build Coinbase into what it is today, and I am sincerely grateful for everything you've done. All impacted team members will receive an email to their personal account in the next hour with more information, and an invitation to meet with an HRBP and a senior leader in your organization. Coinbase system access has been removed today. I know this feels sudden and harsh, but it is the only responsible choice given our duty to protect customer information. To those affected, we will be providing a comprehensive package to support you through this transition. US employees will receive a minimum of 16 weeks base pay (plus 2 weeks per year worked), their next equity vest, and 6 months of COBRA. Employees on a work visa will get extra transition support. Those outside of the US will receive similar support, based on local factors and subject to any consultation requirements. Coinbase prides itself on talent density. Our employees are among the most talented people in the world, and I have no doubt that your skills and experience will be highly sought after as you pursue your next chapters. How we move forward To the team that is staying, I know this is a difficult day. We’re saying goodbye to colleagues and friends you've been in the trenches with. But here’s what I want you to know as we move forward together: Over the past 13 years, we have weathered four crypto winters, gone public, and built the most trusted platform in our industry. We’ve made it this far by making hard decisions and by always staying focused on our mission. This time will be no different – nothing has changed about the long term outlook of our company or industry. And most importantly, our mission has never been more important for the world. Increasing economic freedom requires a new financial system, and we’re building it. The Coinbase that emerges from this will be more capable than ever to achieve our mission. Brian

this is a great GTM strategy for dev tools

Mandatory human-in-the-loop is a cybersecurity cop-out. People are giving agents more and more autonomy. We need solutions that accept that world because there is no stopping it. It's like telling people in the 90s to not use the internet to avoid getting hacked. Good luck.

TBH I don't agree with your take. I don't think Athropic's desire to control the harness is about keeping resource usage under control. They could accomplish that by just enforcing limits on the actual resource usage (which they already do) -- if some third-party harness is inefficient, users of than harness hit their limits faster. I think instead that they want to control the harness because if switching LLM providers is too easy, it makes business difficult for the providers. Say GPT 5.5 comes out and it's clearly smarter, faster, and cheaper than Opus 4.7. If everyone can switch providers with two clicks in their harness, many of them will. This would lead to wild revenue and usage swings, which makes capacity planning hard. And perfect competition drives down prices -- in this scenario Opus has to cut its prices to get some users back. Obviously no business wants to be in that situation! By controlling the harness, they add some stickiness. If switching LLM providers means switching harnesses, that's a barrier high enough that most people won't bother to do it on a whim. So now Opus 4.7 can weather the storm until 4.8 or whatever comes out and is back on top. So it makes perfect sense to me as a business decision. It may be user-unfriendly, but tech companies do stuff like this all the time. It's nothing new. Though I would say, it seems weird to me to do this *on top of* subscriptions. Subscriptions already create a lot of stickiness. If you're subscribed only to Claude, that's a pretty big barrier to trying out GPT quickly -- a bigger barrier than the harness barrier I think. So I question whether controlling the harness is really worth all the effort they are putting into it, but idk, they probably have insights that I don't on this. Another factor here might actually be safety concerns. As we know, Anthropic leadership is deeply (excessively, IMO) worried about AI safety, and they feel that Anthropic will do a better job of addressing safety than any other company. They may feel that control of the harness is an important tool for that. I could definitely imagine Dario being terrified of OpenClaw from a safety perspective (I sort of am too). These explanations make much more sense to me than the efficiency issue, which again seems like it could easily be managed in other ways. But of course, these explanations are much harder to just come out and say, without stirring a lot more outrage...

GPT-5.5 & Opus 4.7 on ARC-AGI-3 - GPT-5.5: 0.43% - Opus 4.7: 0.18% We found 3 failure modes: - True local effect, false world model - Wrong level of abstraction from training data - Solved the level, didn’t reinforce the reward See our full analysis 🧵

For 50 years, software engineering ran on code rationing. Writing code was expensive, so we rationed it carefully through roadmaps, RFCs, prioritization meetings, and scope reviews. This created a role: the No Engineer. No, that won't scale. No, we don't have bandwidth. No, that's out of scope. No, we need a design doc first. The No Engineer was valuable for 50 years. Every "no" saved real money. Their judgment was the rationing system. LLMs will be the end of code rationing. Code is cheap now. And while the No Engineer is explaining why something can't be done, the Yes Engineer has already shipped three versions of it. If you're a Yes Engineer, the next decade is yours.

Mandatory human-in-the-loop is a cybersecurity cop-out. People are giving agents more and more autonomy. We need solutions that accept that world because there is no stopping it. It's like telling people in the 90s to not use the internet to avoid getting hacked. Good luck.