The anatomy of an AI-native org

jchoong

The why and what of any business capability is also a translation. From market needs and signals to requirements and features.

Ifkaluva

> the cost of executing on a bad why just dropped to nearly zero Ah ok, wait until Anthropic sends you the bill.

wood_spirit

This completely chimes with my own thoughts on this. In my mind a lot of AI adoption has been about AI Efficiency” - ICs using AI to do what they’ve always done with less effort but no actual change to the org chart. Whereas I think we need to think about “AI Effectiveness” - using AI more smartly to better communicate and coordinate what we are doing, and transforming the org structure and ways of working towards “AI Native” - the North Star that a fresh competitor startup would execute when starting out with AI as a given.

pydry

Im starting to think that these days the easiest way to detect frontier model influencer content designed to push a stock boosting narrative and real content is the simple presence of one word: "slop". It matches my other experiences with the PR industry - they'd often have blanket bans on the usage of certain phrases, terms or references to "uncomfortable" events. I'm pretty sure this goes for bots on social media too. Indirect references to slop (particularly where it is due to a skill issue) - fine. Just Don't Mention The Word.

mike_hock

> the how people who survive are the ones who can still operate at the deepest layer when something genuinely hard breaks. How do you think the How people learn how to How at the deepest layer when something genuinely hard breaks?

hmokiguess

I don't get the second graphic, can someone explain it to me in simpler terms?

p4ul

> The work that’s left is more interesting and more valuable than the work that’s leaving. I'm not sure I agree with that. Many (or most) of the software engineers I know find the heavy reliance on AI coding agents/assistants pretty soul-sucking and uninteresting. I feel the same, and I'm looking for some kind of middle ground. For example, I will only use agents when doing so would not deprive me of learning and discovery.

JimsonYang

>A much smaller group of people doing how — and the how people who remain are doing the hardest how work Or you could have more work being outputted that isnt really relevant but is trying to pad up a resume. Same number of people remaining but more noise to see through

Ifkaluva

I think this post will age poorly. Middle managers were not “waste”, they served a social function of creating stability and managing workloads. I think the proposed “new model” probably doesn’t scale. Also probably a single human can’t comfortably do that many things. We don’t build orgs to maximally squeeze every drop of productivity and leave behind an empty human husk. Orgs have grown as a negotiated balance between the desire of the capitalist at the top for high productivity, and the desire of the contributors at the bottom for stability. The layers of management in between provide an interface that makes this possible. We’re going to see a couple years of companies crashing and burning trying this “AI native” thing.

lantry

> If your job was mostly converting one well-defined input into a well-defined output — natural language to SQL, requirements to code, ticket to PR, design spec to working component, log line to incident report, customer email to ticket — your task got compressed by an order of magnitude. All of these inputs are rarely well-defined. that's the crux of the whole agile manifesto

nvarsj

Yikes, why is this AI slop post #1 on HN? I have to deal with enough of this at work.

pianopatrick

You could think of the top as translation too. Translate user feedback into a profitable business model. Then translate that business model into a series of projects to make the business model happen. AI can certainly look at more user feedback than executives can...

Morromist

I love how this article has 3 sentences and then stops to quote the first two sentences. Also peppered with a lot of bad, redundant writing: "That’s the shape I’m watching for. That’s the shape I think wins." - those sentences both say the same thing and you didn't need either of them. I feel like that indicates they may not have understood HOW to write a coherent and professional article here, or, indeed, an article worth reading. They clearly understood WHY - they wanted lots of attention and to show how big of an AI booster they are but WHAT they wrote was a lot of gibberish because they didn't know HOW to write.

aeon_ai

> That work was real. It was load-bearing. Sorry, the combination of my eyes rolling into the back of my head while simultaneously vomiting distracted me. I'm ok now, continue.

zug_zug

I dunno, feels a bit pat to me, a bit business-school. I think the how/what/why distinction sounds fun "Look! 3 roles at the company may align with 3 question words!" but doesn't seem to really hold water the more I think about it. I don't think an executive's job is why, it's strategy (what in the long term). I also think what/how questions are inextricably interlinked -- what we should build depends on whether or not we can build/maintain it cheaply enough. Here's where I do agree -- I do think the AI era changes how companies work, it does make them smaller, that reduction in size reduces the amount of filler roles (project managers), and this will be a great benefit to the bottom line. Though ideally this means more competition so that benefit goes to the consumer too.

g-b-r

What a bunch of bullshit. > The 5% of the codebase the agent shouldn’t touch unsupervised WOW.

Alien1Being

Please ban this AI slop.

JumpCrisscross

I don’t understand why the “what” later has more volume in the second chart.

dofm

> A founder writing prompts that drive an agent’s product roadmap is hands-on. I mean, I guess. But I thought the romantic ideal and sometimes, some rare times actually the real lived experience was that what made these people founders was their ideas, their drive, their focus, belief in an idea, their ability to make space for people to take part in their plan etc. If that is getting delegated to Claude, it kind of sounds like they shouldn’t really be expecting the big bucks. If it’s just going to be some wealthy kid with an idea they had in the shower and Claude, why would anyone want to be part of that? Every part of this article makes me fear for our souls, like, sure, you’re a great developer but understand that your manager who is already not listening to your concerns has got Codex on his side telling him he’s got rare insight.

wuliwong

>Not “product managers” in the old sense — not the ticket-writing, JIRA-grooming, sprint-planning archetype. In my experience this is what a lot of product managers do but more importantly they are talking to users, talking to stakeholders, and having discussions with the the team to define the product. His description seems more of the project manager role. > If a manager isn’t contributing to the why, the what, or the trust system that holds the how, it’s hard to say what they’re doing. I think people management is a large part of engineering management. There are definitely other aspects that are significant but I the author made no argument for AI taking over people management nor did they really mention it at all. Also if the other work is all translation and is getting compressed, I don't think the author made any argument as to why the 'non contributing manager' suddenly has to contribute? Seems like the author's old thesis was that non-contributing managers are inefficient or something. Then, without really explaining why they are saying that AI has made his argument stronger.