Coinbase makes Forge central to AI-first software development strategy

Forge, which grew from Cloudbot into an OpenSWE-based internal ecosystem, is being used to parallelize software work inside Coinbase while management says AI spending has fallen as token usage rises.

Summary

Coinbase is expanding Forge, its internal AI engineering platform, into a broader OpenSWE-based ecosystem for software development as the company pushes an "AI-first" strategy, Forbes reported. The system combines agent orchestration, cloud sandboxes, integrations with Slack, Linear and GitHub, sub-agents and automatic pull requests, while a key tool called Mux lets about 600 engineers run multiple AI coding agents in parallel for coding, testing, bug fixes and refactoring. Chintan Turakhia also used the platform in an internal experiment that asked nearly 1,000 engineers to stop using traditional IDE tools for two weeks to gauge what AI-driven workflows could automate, and management says AI spending has declined even as token usage has increased because internally built tools can replace third-party coding services from Anthropic and OpenAI. Public evidence on Forge and Mux remains limited, however, with most disclosures so far coming from Coinbase management rather than broad engineer feedback.

Terms & Concepts
  • OpenSWE: An open-source framework designed to support AI-driven software engineering workflows.
  • agent orchestration: The coordination layer that manages how multiple AI agents are assigned and run across tasks.
  • pull requests: Proposed code changes submitted for review before they are merged into a software project.