How Coinbase scaled AI to 1,000+ engineers | Chintan Turakhia

“Show the engineers, not just tell. And the worst thing any engine leader could do is just be like, I decree you must use AI. Come on. No one's gonna listen to you.”

“I had landed I was going to the East Coast. I landed, for my flight, got into an Uber, hopped on, like, an entire team, all hands, like, speed run. We call it it was, like, basically, cursor speed run. And I was in the Uber using cursor, putting up the PR. And the goal of the speed run was every single person would just pick up the most trivial thing. It could be like copy change, a bug, whatever, and just put up the PR. And we ended up, I think, in fifteen minutes I think a 100 people had joined. In fifteen minutes, we ended up putting up, like, 70 PRs. And we broke GitHub too, which was cool because we learned, like, our infrastructure needed improvement.”

“Then the review time, like, all my devs complain. Review times take too long. We found some solutions, actually. I think we were doing average of, like, a hundred and fifty hours, like, was the cycle time for a PR review because there was so much. We reduced it by 10 x down to, like, fifteen hours or so, roughly.”

“I was on a call with with, like, a a user of our product. Right? And they're like, hey. It'd be cool if you, like, changed x, y, and z. And what literally, while I was on the call, I just put up a PR and pushed it. And they're like, before the call ended, it was thirty minutes. I was like, just, you know, reload the app. It's fixed.”

“Cursor has, like, great analytics. Right? And so you go to the admin panel, you look at the analytics, and, you know, awesomely, they let you download into CSV. I was like, what if I just use cursor to figure out what my team is doing in terms of using cursor, but not in just, like, from a vanity metric point of view of, like, lines of code committed by AI. I think that's, like, kind of misleading, actually digging more into, how they're using Cursor and how do we sort of, like, replicate power users.”

“The trick here, why Slack, is because Slack is how things go viral within your company. If you have pulled out the magic into some separate tool that others can't see, it doesn't happen. And so by getting things into Slack, people just like, holy shit. This is possible. Let's go.”

“I invented this role called super builder. And the single job single most important job of a Super Builder is to create more Super Builders. So we we hired our first Super Builder and they, we we talked about some ideas and one of the biggest things because most of our company uses Slack. We're all in Slack. And Slack, you know, I'm strong it's like strong believer is just a bunch of humans pretending to be systems. Right? And the cost of writing something in Slack is zero, but the cost of answering something in Slack is enormous, and most of it is noise.”

“I love food and wine. I really do. And, like, I've done, like, sommelier training, etcetera, etcetera. With my friend in New York, we went to some, like, champagne tasting. And so, like, I just took notes. There's, like, this whole notebook. Effectively, then I just, like, popped this right in. And I said, here are a bunch of champagnes that I tasted. Figure out from my notes, like, what are my taste preferences?”

“The nuclear option is I threaten it, and I say, Claude, if I'm using, like, Claude Opus for 4.5 high, like, okay. I'm gonna stop using you, Claude. I'm gonna switch to Gemini, and then it gets its shit together.”