Episode Details

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Rob Witoff, CTO of Coinbase, joins us in his first interview since returning to the crypto company. He explains why 98–99% of Coinbase’s code is now written by agents, how his engineers went from writing code by hand to supervising 3–10 agents each in a single year, and why a Friday-morning “spicy feedback” agent may be giving Coinbase bigger productivity gains than AI in product development.

In our in-depth conversation, we discuss:

* Why Coinbase engineers are producing 100x the code they did a year ago, and why agent managers of agent managers are coming next

* Why it’s now cheaper to build a prototype than to ask for permission, and why a picture is worth a thousand words but a prototype is worth a million

* The weekly AI feedback agent every Coinbase employee receives, and the “spicy” section that tells Rob to get out of the weeds

* Why crypto is so volatile, and why "it's never as good or as bad as it seems

* Will Coinbase become the financial super app?

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Download the transcript 👇

Timestamps

(0:00) Meet Rob Witoff(2:30) Crypto's Understated Opportunity(4:09) Coinbase's Next Opportunity(5:30) Inside Coinbase's CTO Role(8:10) Managing a Third of the Company Under Engineering(10:28) Taste & Judgment in the Modern Era of Engineering(13:33) Inside Coinbase's Engineering Team: Zero to One(15:35) How to Set Up Engineers for Success(18:28) How Rob Sets Up His Agents(20:17) How Disruptive Are Model Updates(22:51) Would Coinbase Ever Launch Its Own AI Model?(26:12) Agentic Trading(26:52) Why Are Markets So Volatile?(29:02) What Is the Super App Opportunity?(31:20) Why Now Is the Moment for Agentic Financial Services(34:38) The Fundamentals of Security(

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