vrub

24, real estate, tinkering

[ein @stylishdawg]

chat wtf is my intern talking about

[Simon Eskildsen @Sirupsen]

turbopuffer crossed $100M run-rate in March. 19mo after $1M. Profitable & <$1M raised.

Cursor・Anthropic・Notion・Cognition・Harvey・Bridgewater・Ramp・Linear・Legora・Superhuman・Atlassian・Granola

We’d be nowhere without them. We work like hell to exceed their expectations.

[vrub @Vrubzy]

just ran pnpm deepsec process with Opus 4.7 Max

why is there a repo truck outside my house now

[Vercel Developers @vercel_dev]

Introducing deepsec, an open source coding security harness.

• CLI-first
• Sandbox-based scaling
• Pluggable coding agents
• Designed for large-scale repos
• Use AI Gateway or your own subscription

After months of successful internal use, we put it to the test on some of the largest open source codebases.
https://t.co/sPxZ6izJVV

[vrub @Vrubzy]

@artman @linear based

[vrub @Vrubzy]

"We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including 'one person teams' with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role."

what a time to be alive.

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

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

[zam @zamdoteth]

There should be a YC/venture capital for really bad founders

Give money to the absolute retards and see what they do with it

Paralympics type shit

[vrub @Vrubzy]

curious about the hype around this Claude Mythos gimmick when it’s not even SOTA?

[vrub @Vrubzy]

@727gator 😔

[vrub @Vrubzy]

officially a member of the permanent underclass.

[Rohin Dhar @rohindhar]

San Francisco home sale in the Cole Valley neighborhood at $2.3MM over asking price

[donald @donaldjewkes]

two friends used AI to clone Epstein's Gmail

it's been used by over 150 million people

and it was built in just 5 hours – here's how they did it

[vrub @Vrubzy]

@rohindhar in love with the workout studio out back

[vrub @Vrubzy]

@cursor_ai love to see cursor staying on the gas

[vrub @Vrubzy]

can we make cursor cool again? so sick of terminal

[vrub @Vrubzy]

you’ve never experienced real pain until you’ve mixed up the equinox hairspray with the deodorant spray

[vrub @Vrubzy]

@jjacky infinitely scalable. incredible work team

[vrub @Vrubzy]

@bankertobuilder very nice but that lawn and those trees are going to be a maintenance nightmare! mind if i suggest

[Ryo Lu @ryolu_]

when software had a soul

there was a moment around 2005 when using a Mac felt like touching something alive.

the dock bounced. the genie effect swooped. exposé scattered your windows like cards on a table. none of it was strictly necessary. all of it felt like someone cared – not about metrics, but about the feeling of using a machine.

software back then had texture. it had a philosophy. you could feel the person behind it. someone made a decision to make that icon beautiful, to animate that transition just so, to write that error message with a little warmth. apps had personalities. some were weird. some were over-designed in ways that would make a modern PM flinch. but they were alive.

the web was the same. personal sites were genuinely personal. blogs felt like letters. forums had regulars. you knew who made what. the internet had neighborhoods, and each one felt different.

nothing was optimized for scale. things were made by people who loved what they were making.

somewhere along the way, we traded all of that for growth.

A/B tests flattened the edges. design systems standardized the personality out. everything got faster, smoother, more consistent – and somehow less interesting. the quirks were removed because they didn't test well. the warmth got cut because it wasn't measurable. we optimized our way into a world of things that work perfectly and feel like nothing.
now every app looks the same. every interface follows the same patterns. every product speaks in the same calm, frictionless voice, siloed in their own little islands. the humanity got rounded off.

and then came AI agents. and the speed got inhuman.

now you can generate an entire product in an afternoon. ship a feature before lunch. spin up ten variations before anyone's had their coffee. the gap from idea to code is basically zero.

which sounds incredible. and it is. but there's a catch.

when making things are too easy, the slop comes for free too. mediocre things don't look obviously bad – they look fine. they work. they ship. they pass review. and now there are infinite of them. the internet is filling up with software that functions but means nothing. interfaces that are correct but feel dead. products made by agents, reviewed by no one, shipped into the void.

this is the thing that keeps me up at night. not that AI will replace people who care. but that it will drown them out.

here's what I still believe: the best things are made by people who couldn't help themselves. someone who lost sleep over an icon. who rewrote the same line of copy twelve times. who added an animation nobody asked for because it made the thing feel right. that obsession – that's not inefficiency. that's the whole point.

AI doesn't make that irrelevant. it actually makes it rarer and more valuable. taste is not a markdown skill. caring is not a parameter. the weird, specific, "soul" thing you put into something – that can't be programmed into existence.

the path forward isn't to make more slop faster. it's to finally give people with real vision the tools to make the thing they always imagined but couldn't build alone. the designer who had the idea but couldn't code. the kid who saw something nobody else saw. the person who cared too much about something most people wouldn't notice.

if we get this right, we don't get a faster factory. we get a renaissance. more strange, personal, opinionated software made by teams of people who care and mean it.

that's still possible. but only if the people who care get the space and tools to actually express themselves – and don't just hand the wheel to the agent and walk away.

[vrub @Vrubzy]

how it feels to open claude code and codex

[Love and Smile @spongebobkissme]

I have my cookies i have my milk oh its gamer time

[Artur Chakhvadze @norpadon]

Our entire LLM inference engine with all the GPU kernels and stuff is around ~70K lines of code

What the fuck?

[vrub @Vrubzy]

@nico_jeannen @AnthropicAI https://t.co/3l1CdqagDt