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A comment on Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%. Parent comment

Re:Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size... by pron on Tuesday May 05, 2026 @08:36PM (#48030681)
And if the trend doesn't continue? I understand that a company with Coinbase's performance has little to lose and not many options, but many companies are in a better position.

The problem is that executives could take the 15-20% productivity boost and be content, but they read stuff like this, get greedy, and they don't understand the risk they're taking.

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Re:Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size... by atonse on Tuesday May 05, 2026 @09:15PM (#48030969)
Even if the trend doesn’t continue, the current models are very very good. They’re better than the average programmer in the industry, already.
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Re:Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size... by pron on Tuesday May 05, 2026 @11:04PM (#48031637)
I don't know how anyone who carefully and closely reviews their output could possibly think that. Much of the time their code is fine, but every now and again they make a catastrophic (though often well-hidden) mistake that is so bad that all the tests pass but the codebase will be bricked if enough of those go in. They make such disastrous mistakes frequently enough that a decent-sized codebase can't last for more than 18-24 months.

If the average programmer is this bad, then there must be better-than-average programmers reviewing the code. The problem with agents is that they can produce code at a far higher volume than the average programmer.

Anyway, I don't know how well the average programmer programs, but if you commit agent-generated code without careful review, your codebase will be cooked in a year or two.

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Re:Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size... by zeroonetwothree on Tuesday May 05, 2026 @09:31PM (#48031063)
Maybe at some coding benchmark. Certainly not at actually shipping and maintaining production grade software.
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Re:Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size... by randallsquared on Tuesday May 05, 2026 @08:40PM (#48030716)
Agreed! That will be an... "interesting" outcome, if so, for a lot of these companies.
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