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

58 min episode · 2 min read
·
Chintan Turakhia

Episode

58 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Remote Work, Fundraising & VC, Leadership

AI-Generated Summary

Key Takeaways

  • Leadership by demonstration: Engineering leaders who mandate AI tool adoption without personal hands-on usage fail. Turakhia spent January through April 2025 using Cursor daily, identifying specific wins like automated PR creation from plain-language commands, then showed engineers concrete examples rather than issuing top-down directives. Credibility requires personal fluency before organizational change.
  • PR Speed Run format: To accelerate adoption, Turakhia ran a timed all-hands session where every engineer submitted one trivial PR using Cursor within 30 minutes. A team-level run produced 70 PRs; a company-wide run with 800 engineers produced 300–400 PRs. The format creates visible proof of velocity and breaks psychological inertia around AI tools.
  • Target toil first: AI adoption sticks when it eliminates work engineers already resent. Turakhia prioritized unit test generation, linting automation, and git command replacement as entry points. Removing these "soul-draining" tasks creates early wins that build habitual usage before engineers attempt more complex agent-driven workflows in their daily development cycles.
  • Cycle time compression: Coinbase reduced average PR review cycle time from 150 hours to roughly 15 hours — a 10x reduction — by combining AI-assisted authoring with structured review workflows. Turakhia measures AI impact through full ticket-to-user delivery time rather than lines of code, capturing every coordination, review, and deployment stage in one metric.
  • Slack as adoption infrastructure: Turakhia's team built an internal agent called Cloudbot that accepts commands directly in Slack, reads Linear tickets, queries Datadog, Sentry, Amplitude, and Snowflake, then authors PRs across multiple codebases. Routing AI workflows through Slack rather than separate tools makes adoption viral — colleagues observe outputs in real time and self-onboard organically.

What It Covers

Chintan Turakhia, Senior Director of Engineering at Coinbase, details how he drove Cursor AI adoption across 1,000+ engineers by leading hands-on, running company-wide PR speed runs, and building custom Slack-based agents that compress the full cycle from user feedback to shipped code.

Key Questions Answered

  • Leadership by demonstration: Engineering leaders who mandate AI tool adoption without personal hands-on usage fail. Turakhia spent January through April 2025 using Cursor daily, identifying specific wins like automated PR creation from plain-language commands, then showed engineers concrete examples rather than issuing top-down directives. Credibility requires personal fluency before organizational change.
  • PR Speed Run format: To accelerate adoption, Turakhia ran a timed all-hands session where every engineer submitted one trivial PR using Cursor within 30 minutes. A team-level run produced 70 PRs; a company-wide run with 800 engineers produced 300–400 PRs. The format creates visible proof of velocity and breaks psychological inertia around AI tools.
  • Target toil first: AI adoption sticks when it eliminates work engineers already resent. Turakhia prioritized unit test generation, linting automation, and git command replacement as entry points. Removing these "soul-draining" tasks creates early wins that build habitual usage before engineers attempt more complex agent-driven workflows in their daily development cycles.
  • Cycle time compression: Coinbase reduced average PR review cycle time from 150 hours to roughly 15 hours — a 10x reduction — by combining AI-assisted authoring with structured review workflows. Turakhia measures AI impact through full ticket-to-user delivery time rather than lines of code, capturing every coordination, review, and deployment stage in one metric.
  • Slack as adoption infrastructure: Turakhia's team built an internal agent called Cloudbot that accepts commands directly in Slack, reads Linear tickets, queries Datadog, Sentry, Amplitude, and Snowflake, then authors PRs across multiple codebases. Routing AI workflows through Slack rather than separate tools makes adoption viral — colleagues observe outputs in real time and self-onboard organically.

Notable Moment

During a live user call, Turakhia authored and shipped a fix before the 30-minute conversation ended, then asked the user to reload the app to confirm the change. The story reframes what "fast feedback loops" actually means in practice for product teams.

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Episode Transcript

People are skeptical that large, established, highly technical, highly capable engineering organizations can deploy AI at scale and get any effect. But I think you've proven it's possible. It's not only possible, it's adapt or die. It's just been such a huge superpower for the team. How many engineers are we talking about here? A thousand plus. So we're not messing around here. The company tried to adopt other AI tools, and we saw this uptick in adoption. People opened it up, checked the box, did kind of like a hello world thing, but it didn't stick. My biggest thing is how do I make this damn thing stick? Because there's something here. I do think that it's really important when you're doing this organizational transformation that you have a single person with incredible conviction at the leadership metal. 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. Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Bell, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, we have Chintan Turakhia, senior director of engineering at Coinbase, and he's gonna show us, yes, it is possible to drive AI adoption and higher velocity in an engineering organization of thousands of engineers. He's also gonna show us the new expectations for engineering managers and engineering leaders, which is less meetings and more code. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. AI has already changed how we work. Tools are helping teams write better code, analyze customer data, and even handle support tickets automatically. But there's a catch. These tools only work well when they have deep access to company systems. Your copilot needs to see your entire code base. Your chatbot needs to search across internal docs. And for enterprise buyers, that raises serious security concerns. That's why these apps face intense IT scrutiny from day one. To pass, they need secure authentication, access controls, audit logs, the whole suite of enterprise features. Building all that from scratch, it's a massive lift. That's where WorkOS comes in. WorkOS gives you drop in APIs for enterprise features so your app can become enterprise ready and scale up market faster. Think of it like Stripe for enterprise features. OpenAI, Perplexity, and Cursor are already using Work OS to move faster and meet enterprise demands. Join them and hundreds of other industry leaders at workos.com. Start building today. Chintan, thank you so much for joining. What I love about what we're gonna talk about today is we've spent so much time talking about the individual vibe coder or the nontechnical person becoming a software engineer, and still people are skeptical that large, established, highly technical, highly capable engineering organizations can deploy AI at scale and get any effect. There's still so much skepticism, but I think …

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  • 💼 SPONSORS [{"name": "WorkOS", "url": "https://workos.com"}
  • Turakhia's team built an internal agent called Cloudbot that accepts commands directly in Slack, reads Linear tickets, queries Datadog, Sentry, Amplitude, and Snowflake, then authors PRs across multiple codebases
  • Turakhia's team built an internal agent called Cloudbot that accepts commands directly in Slack, reads Linear tickets, queries Datadog, Sentry, Amplitude, and Snowflake
  • by Atlassian

    💼 SPONSORS [{"name": "Rovo by Atlassian", "url": "https://rovo.com"}]
  • Turakhia's team built an internal agent called Cloudbot that accepts commands directly in Slack, reads Linear tickets, queries Datadog, Sentry, Amplitude, and Snowflake
  • Turakhia's team built an internal agent called Cloudbot that accepts commands directly in Slack, reads Linear tickets, queries Datadog, Sentry, Amplitude, and Snowflake
  • CursorRecommended
    Chintan Turakhia, Senior Director of Engineering at Coinbase, details how he drove Cursor AI adoption across 1,000+ engineers by leading hands-on, running company-wide PR speed runs... Turakhia spent January through April 2025 using Cursor daily, identifying specific wins like automated PR creation from plain-language commands
  • Turakhia's team built an internal agent called Cloudbot that accepts commands directly in Slack, reads Linear tickets, queries Datadog, Sentry, Amplitude, and Snowflake

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