Sylvain

Building a portfolio of projects. Tech Lead, now full AI.

Available for advisory & technical partnerships 👇

[Sylvain @sylvnco]

I just saw the little gamification trick of Conductor.

For context each time you create a worktree it's labelled as a city. It then display the visited city on a map with some tier (Uncommon, Rare, legendary).

It's useless but It's kind of fun, and now I want to max out the map.

It make me think to do something like that for my own websites

Very clever !

[Sylvain @sylvnco]

It turns out you do have a lot of insights when you start speaking to your customer / target audience.

I should have started sooner (as everyone said).

If it can help other people to do so, I did notice that when you actually try to help people achieve something they are way more likely to answers and to try to help you help them.

And they don't bite.

[Sylvain @sylvnco]

@T_Zahil I did the velo francette in april. 70km a day It was exhausting as hell. 110km is something else. (Nice bike thought)

[Sylvain @sylvnco]

For me the most interesting parts is :

- Less layers, max 5 (still a lots tbh) with 15+ direct report.
-No pure managers. Every team lead must actually contribute.
-Everybody should use AI.

This is what I experience with my current client. It's probably still the beginning.

[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

[Sylvain @sylvnco]

If every job offer has "competitive salary" maybe your salary offer is not as competitive as you think.

[Sylvain @sylvnco]

Unpopular opinion: I think X auto-translate is not great.

Each language has its own specificity and nuance that make it difficult to translate in other languages.

I'd rather see a tweet I can't read than a translated one I think I understood

[Sylvain @sylvnco]

Fun fact, it seems that AI hasn't internalized its own impact on dev speed yet

When I try to brainstorm for project ideas it still tells me it will take months to build. But no, it will take at best a few days.

[Sylvain @sylvnco]

Writing code is fast now.

What's slow is deciding what to build next. So now in company where product decision is separate from the dev, you have a huge bottleneck.

In the end they should probably either be the same person or work more closely together in small iteration.

[Sylvain @sylvnco]

Today, an agent from an AI generated company reach out to me from one of my websites saying their product is 100% matching my audience and we should start discuss partnership.

I was impressed.

Turns out neither the website nor the product actually exist.

This is AGI.

[Sylvain @sylvnco]

I have been testing it since this morning and apart from the kind of a little bit annoying 8 bits sounds (that can be configured) it's really good to handle multiple agent running.

For 15/19$ seems like a no brainer.

[Guido Rosso @guidorosso]

Open RIVE roles 🚀

🧑‍🎨 Creative Technologist — dogfood the editor, build demos, shape the product

👩‍💻 Editor Engineer — core editor with @luigirosso (CTO), @airnanan (founder of Lottie), @philterdesign (Flash OG)

🤖 Applied AI Engineer — give our AI agent superpowers across design, animation, and code

🔧 DevOps — CI/CD and infra across all our open-source runtimes

[Alex @mustache_dev]

Hello ! My team at Basement is still looking for a front-end dev, React - Next.js expert with a keen eye on design !

Go apply if you feel that’s you.

[Sylvain @sylvnco]

@T_Zahil Nice !

[Thomas Sanlis 🥐 @T_Zahil]

It's happening. Here are the participants for the first batch of the Uneed Residency 💥

But all of this wouldn't be possible without our 2 sponsors:

🏆 Fload[.com], one of the most impressive projects I've seen in the past few months: an AI employee for your mobile apps. Be careful if you decide to read their landing page, you're going to be impressed 🔥!

🏆 @creem_io, the best platform to sell your products online! They have the lowest fees on the market, are a MoR, and trust me, the design of their product will make you melt 🍦

And the residents are........🥁

👉🏻 Dmytro (@DmytroBavykin) and Alexandra (@olexalysenko) will be working on SimplePoo and a new project 👀

👉🏻 Luca (@ikoichi) and Mattia (@heymattia) will grow BlackTwist, their Threads scheduling tool

👉🏻 Soraia (@SoraiaDev) will be building MiroMiro, a chrome extension to copy any website's design in 1 click

👉🏻 Maxence (@MaxInPublic) will be working on Beplan, his social media scheduler

👉🏻 Pauline (@Pauline_Cx) will probably reach $2M MRR before everyone of us with all her projects, like Feedbask and IAcrea!

👉🏻 Filip (@filippkowalski) and Emanuele (@ema_totaro) will work on their mobile apps empire

👉🏻 Marina (@cinamarina) will grow Luma, an app to help manage anxiety and stress with science-backed exercises.

👉🏻 Dmytro (@DmytroKrasun) will certainly make us all wiser, and will work on ScreenshotOne, his screenshots API ‐ if we grant him some free time

👉🏻 Nicolas (@NicolasPapegaey) will grow his mobile apps empire, probably sharing secrets with Filip and Emanuele

👉🏻 Hugo (@hugolassiege) will work on Writizzy, our blogging platform, and will help me organize the whole event!

And last but not least, Benjamin (@benjamincode, if you're French and between 7-77 you know him) will work on meetsponsors and AutoTrim, and will probably make us famous just by being there 🙇🏻

From May 26 to June 2, all those fantastic people will gather together in a nice manor in France, to build, share, and grow together for the first Uneed Residency.

I can't express how excited I am 🤩!

In the coming weeks, I'll share an interview with every resident with you, so that you can learn more about them.

We will also be planning the week, and we have some pretty exciting stuff ahead 👀

[Sylvain @sylvnco]

What a time to be alive !

[Claude @claudeai]

New in Claude Code: Remote Control.

Kick off a task in your terminal and pick it up from your phone while you take a walk or join a meeting.

Claude keeps running on your machine, and you can control the session from the Claude app or https://t.co/er6Blrr63e

[Sylvain @sylvnco]

@sobedominik No I don't have a better idea to be honest. Maybe a full section for family but it's hard to do as people don't always mention that they supporte multiple person. So let wait and see if other people have better idea :p

[Sylvain @sylvnco]

@alightinastorm I would like to be in please

[Sylvain @sylvnco]

The less I touch my website, the more traffic I have.

Lesson learned