The rise of agentic coding tools has been a sea change for software engineers across the industry. For Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko, it seems to have landed particularly hard. Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt, Yakovenko said he has become increasingly comfortable taking a backseat in software development tasks.
Yakovenko described his experience with agentic coding after more than fifteen years developing software. He stated that AI has been a great force multiplier for an expert. Now he can just watch Claude churning through its work and he can almost smell when it is going off the rails. He continued that if people are in a meeting with him and he is not paying attention, it is because he is watching Claude.
As a co-founder of the Solana cryptocurrency protocol, Yakovenko has seen immense success this year, even as many cryptocurrencies have struggled. The system announced two point eight five billion dollars in annual revenue earlier this month, fueled largely by crypto trading platforms. Even more impressive was the Solana coin’s first exchange-traded fund, launched the day before Yakovenko took the stage. Launched by the crypto asset manager Bitwise, the fund saw nearly seventy million dollars of inflows in a single day.
On stage, Yakovenko attributed the success to a growing acceptance of crypto, especially from the conventional finance industry. He said that if you are a back-office finance person, you actually get crypto much much faster. He explained that finance people deal with settlement risk all the time and they deal with banking risk all the time.
Over the same period, cryptocurrency has drawn significant new criticism for enabling public bribery, particularly in connection with the Solana-hosted Trumpcoin. The coin has directed an estimated three hundred fifty million dollars to the president, which critics see as a form of bribery. This is especially true in the wake of Trump’s high-profile pardons for Tron founder Justin Sun and Binance founder Changpeng Zhao.
But as long as Solana is an open protocol, Yakovenko has little control over the coins it hosts. He explained on stage that he could send you an email with a link to Trumpcoin or Fartcoin, and both of those are protocols, both the email and the underlying protocol that creates that market.