Why all this?
The honest section. About what happens to companies and roles when work runs through agents. And about why we're scared — and still having fun.
What's changing — we can already see it
Work moves faster. There's more to write down. There's more to keep in your head. And roles are changing.
Not long ago we had analysts, testers, developers, marketers — like everyone else. Now our structure is flat, and each of us is called an architect. An architect is an analyst, a tester, a product manager and a few other people besides. We do completely different kinds of work, and that's fine.
The expertise didn't go anywhere — it moved into skills. Former analysts write skills for analysis and make sure their colleagues' agents don't mess up. Developers write skills for their own tech stacks. Our development pipeline is a skill too: it takes a task from the request all the way to code, through a spec, a plan, a test plan and a task tree in SKEIN (see the use case).
The owner, of course, sits around picking his nose and tossing out ideas: he has the taste and the feel for the business.
The singularity — is it like this for you too?
We don't know where this leads. We agree that we're in the singularity. On the one hand, we're scared. On the other, with agents this capable, every day we get the feeling that we're already late. We asked around — plenty of people who work with agents feel the same:
“I've never felt this much behind as a programmer.”
“I feel like a lazy babysitter that's just doing enough to keep the kids from hurting themselves.”
“现在项目推进的越来越快，人也越来越累。” (our translation: “projects move faster and faster, and people get more and more tired”)
“Brain fry isn't your weakness — it's a sign of badly designed work around AI.” (our translation from Russian)
That last line we'd hang on the wall. SKEIN is work design, not one more agent. It doesn't make agents smarter and it doesn't write code. It makes sure that when work runs through agents, you don't lose the thread: who asked for what, who took it, what got done and why it was decided that way.
Where SKEIN fits
Roles have blurred, there are fewer people in the chain and many times more agents, and tasks appear faster than you can read them. In a world like that, the one thing you can't leave to chance is what was agreed. SKEIN is where those agreements live — for people and agents alike. We don't know what next year will look like, but we do know that without this skein we'd already be tangled up.