Arie Jones

what would you most like to see improve in our next model?

We experienced an outage at Coinbase last night, which is never acceptable. The root cause was a room overheating in an AWS datacenter when multiple chillers failed. We design our services to be redundant to downtime in any one AWS Availability Zone (AZ), and most of our systems worked this way last night, but not all. Our centralized exchange did not. Exchanges have unique architectures that optimize for latency and co-location of clients. It is possible to make exchanges resistant to AZ failures, but this can introduce latency delays that are not desirable along with breaking customer co-location. Given this incident, we'll revisit these tradeoffs to ensure we're giving you the best possible venue to trade. At a minimum, the duration of an outage should be able to be reduced considerably when an AZ move is needed. Thank you to the AWS and Coinbase teams for working through the night to mitigate the issue. We’ll share the detailed technical summary once it's ready.

A new study just blew up the entire "vibe coding" movement. Researchers from UC San Diego and Cornell tracked 112 experienced software developers using AI agents in their actual jobs. The finding is the opposite of every viral demo on your timeline. Professional developers don't vibe code. They control. Here's what they actually found. The researchers ran two studies. 13 developers were observed live as they coded with agents in real production work. 99 more answered a deep qualitative survey. Every participant had at least 3 years of professional experience. Some had 25. The viral pitch of agentic coding goes like this. Hand the agent a vague prompt. Don't read the diff. Forget the code even exists. Trust the vibes. Andrej Karpathy coined the term. Tens of thousands of developers on X claim to run "dozens of agents at once" building entire production systems hands-off. The data says almost nobody serious actually works that way. Here is what experienced developers do instead. → They plan before they prompt. They write out the architecture, the constraints, and the edge cases first, then hand the agent a tightly scoped task. → They review every diff. Not because they're paranoid. Because they've seen what happens when you don't. → They constrain the agent's blast radius. Small, well-defined tasks only. The moment a problem touches multiple systems or has unclear requirements, they take over. → They treat the agent like a fast junior dev that needs supervision, not a senior engineer that can be trusted alone. The researchers also found something darker buried in the data. A separate randomized trial they cite showed that experienced open source maintainers were 19% slower when allowed to use AI. A different agentic system deployed in a real issue tracker had only 8% of its invocations result in a merged pull request. 92% failure rate in production. 19% productivity drop for senior devs. The viral demos lied to you. The paper's biggest insight is in one sentence: experienced developers feel positive about AI agents only when they remain in control. The moment they let go, quality collapses, and they know it. This matches what every serious shop has quietly figured out. The developers shipping the most with AI right now aren't the ones vibing. They're the ones with the strictest review processes, the tightest task scoping, and the clearest mental model of what the agent can and cannot do. Vibe coding makes for great Twitter videos. It does not make great software. The next time someone tells you they let Claude build their entire SaaS in a weekend, ask them how much of that code they've actually read. The honest answer separates real engineers from the demo crowd.

JOE "LITTLE GUY" ROGAN IS TOO CHICKEN TO HAVE ME ON HIS FAILING PODCAST BECAUSE HE KNOW I'D CRUSH HIM, SO HE TAKES CHEAP SHOTS FROM THE PEANUT GALLERY AS HE GETS RELEGATED TO IRRELEVANCY. ALL TALK, NO ACTION. I'M READY WHEN YOU ARE, "LITTLE GUY." OR KEEP HIDING!!!! — Governor GCN

Starbucks CEO defends a cup of coffee costing $9 He says the customers needs to just not think about it as a $9 cup of coffee, you’re paying for the “experience” of getting a Starbucks coffee “In some cases a $9 experience does feel like you're splurging, and then what that means is we have to make it worthwhile.” He says Starbucks customers “want to have a special experience and regardless of what your income level is, in some cases, a $9 experience does feel like you're splurging — well, this is a really affordable premium experience” How out of touch could a person possibly be…

Stop learning to code. Start learning to think. Machines code now. They’ll never think like you.

Trial over

user sends a dollar stablecoin to their family family converts that to their local currency stablecoin family offramps that local stablecoin 1:1 should be basically 0% fees at every step because stablecoin issuers are incentivized to grow float so provide 1:1 onramps and the FX is onchain and incredibly capital efficient

feels like a good time to seriously rethink how operating systems and user interfaces are designed (also the internet; there should be a protocol that is equally usable by people and agents)