Your company needs more meetings
Conway’s law says you ship your org chart: a product mirrors the shape of the organization that built it.
The mechanism behind Conway’s law is communication. Where talking is cheap and easy, people stay aligned. Where it’s hard, they build in silos.
Human→agent communication is cheap and constant, so you stay in sync with your own agents.
Human↔human communication is not cheap, so it often doesn’t happen.
In practice, a 10-person, AI-first company forms ten little kingdoms. Each person plows ahead with their team of agents, staying consistent inside their territory. The problems show up at the borders between kingdoms. Where communication breaks down, the product breaks down too.
At agent speed a small misalignment between two people isn’t so small anymore. It’s two whole teams of agents working at cross purposes, drifting apart as fast as they can generate tokens.
Left alone, the decay is predictable:
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People talk less. When each human has a team of agents to manage, they spend their talking time on their agents instead of each other. Conversations between people shrink.
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Dissent disappears. With more speed and less communication, there’s no natural moment to push back. On a human team, someone eventually says “this is a bad idea.” Agents almost never do. If the humans stop disagreeing with each other, nobody disagrees at all.
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The borders fall into disrepair. Naming, UX, writing style, security, performance: anything that emerges on its own instead of having a specific owner. If it’s nobody’s job to keep it consistent, nobody does. Small papercuts compound, and before you know it, the product is a fragmented mess.
Each of these is a coordination failure, and none of them are new. Companies have always had silos, unowned problems, and yes-men. Agents just make each problem bigger and faster.
Managers learned the fix a long time ago. At pre-AI companies, directors talked to each other constantly. Routing information and keeping people aligned was most of the job.
AI made everyone a director without giving them a director’s tools.
Would you run a company where the directors barely talk to each other? Without an intervention, that’s effectively what you’ll do.
“But all that coordination sounds like a lot of work. Aren’t agents supposed to speed us up, not slow us down?”
Yes. But not everything speeds up at the same rate. Agents speed up execution. They don’t speed up agreement.
Agents can do the IC work and most of the status coordination that used to be a manager’s job better than we can. We should let them.
What they can’t do is set direction. What are we trying to do? Who’s our customer? Where do our goals conflict? What won’t we build?
Agents can’t answer these for you, because direction is what they expect from you. So let them kill the status meetings, and spend that time on direction instead.
How to fix it
Give the borders owners. Security, customer experience, data definitions, etc. should all have a named owner. If there are cracks, stuff will fall through them. Close the cracks you care about.
Hold human-only direction meetings. Once a week, get together and discuss where you’re going, what’s important, and what’s not. Have agents take notes and flag where current work conflicts with what you decide. Store the notes somewhere your agents will check, so the decisions feed back to the ones doing the work.
Start with proposals, and require dissent. Every significant idea should start as a proposal for humans to review. Every proposal should include the strongest case against it. Require a human↔human discussion before anything big gets built.
I know what you’re thinking: that sounds slow. And yes, it is.
The companies that get this wrong will look great for a year. They’ll ship 10x more than anyone thought possible for their size. But in the background, the edges will fray and the kingdoms will drift apart.
The companies that get this right might only ship 9x as much, but their people will all be moving in the same direction. And ten people, closely aligned, are worth more than ever.
So sure, make the robots do your standup.
But have the meeting where you actually talk about where you’re going.
And then have it again.