Coinbase acquired enterprise licenses for GitHub Copilot and Cursor and required all engineers to complete initial onboarding of AI coding assistants within one week. The company instructed engineers via Slack to at least onboard, scheduled a Saturday meeting for anyone who had not, and terminated employees without sufficient reasons for noncompliance. Leadership framed AI implementation as a company-wide priority and expects broader AI adoption across teams. Tech leadership at other major firms has similarly mandated or strongly encouraged AI use for engineering teams and warned that AI could reshape workforce size and job expectations.
'AI's 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,'
As he tells it, Armstrong heard it might take quarters to onboard the company's computer engineers to the AI coding tools. Instead, he "went rogue" with a post in Slack asking every engineer to onboard by the end of the week. At the Saturday meeting, Armstrong showed how important the AI mandate was. "Some of them had a good reason because they were just getting back from some trip or something," Armstrong said. "Some of them didn't, and they got fired."
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