Coinbase Fired Engineers Who Didn't Learn AI in Five Days. The Industry Barely Flinched.

My project: Hermes IDE | GitHub Me: gabrielanhaia Monday morning. A message goes out to every engineer at Coinbase: learn GitHub Copilot and Cursor. Not next quarter. Not when the current sprint wraps. By Friday. Saturday, the holdouts sit across from Brian Armstrong himself. The ones who can't produce a "good reason" for skipping the tools don't make it to the following week. That's not a thought experiment. It happened at one of the largest crypto exchanges on the planet, and Armstrong described it on John Collison's Cheeky Pint podcast with the relaxed confidence of someone who's already decided the conversation is over. The tech industry's response? A collective shrug. The Timeline Nobody Talks About Five business days. That's the window Armstrong gave his engineering organization to become proficient with AI-assisted coding tools. Not "try them out." Not "evaluate whether they fit your workflow." Proficient. Here's the sequence: Monday: Mandate goes out. Every engineer must adopt