[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":235},["ShallowReactive",2],{"blog-\u002Fblog\u002Fai-just-killed-middle-management":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"body":6,"date":223,"description":224,"extension":225,"meta":226,"navigation":227,"path":228,"seo":229,"stem":230,"tag":231,"thumbnail":232,"youtube_url":233,"__hash__":234},"blog\u002Fblog\u002Fai-just-killed-middle-management.md","AI Just Killed Middle Management",{"type":7,"value":8,"toc":211},"minimark",[9,13,24,29,32,39,43,46,57,60,76,79,83,86,91,94,98,101,108,111,117,121,124,131,134,140,144,147,167,174,177,181,184,187,192,196,199,202,208],[10,11,12],"p",{},"For 2,000 years, every large organization on Earth has run on the same operating system: human middle management. From the Roman army to modern corporations, the solution to \"how do you coordinate thousands of people?\" has always been the same — stack humans in layers and route information up and down. Jack Dorsey thinks that's about to end.",[10,14,15,16,23],{},"His recent article on X, ",[17,18,22],"a",{"href":19,"rel":20},"https:\u002F\u002Fx.com\u002Fjack\u002Fstatus\u002F2039003879841362278",[21],"nofollow","From Hierarchy to Intelligence",", lays out how Block is eliminating traditional corporate hierarchy and replacing it with AI-driven \"world models.\" It got 5M+ views, and honestly, it's one of the more interesting org design pieces I've read. Let me break down what he's actually proposing and where I think it's heading.",[25,26,28],"h2",{"id":27},"the-2000-year-old-operating-system","The 2,000-Year-Old Operating System",[10,30,31],{},"Dorsey opens with the Roman army. Their core problem: how do you coordinate thousands of soldiers across vast distances with limited communication? Their answer was a nested hierarchy with consistent span of control at every level. The smallest unit, eight soldiers sharing a tent, led by one person. Groups of those units led by another person. And so on, all the way up.",[10,33,34,35],{},"If you've worked at any company with more than 50 people, this should sound familiar. Individual contributors at the bottom, managers above them, managers of managers above those, all the way up to the C-suite. Upper management communicates decisions down to direct reports, who communicate to theirs, and so on. ",[36,37,38],"strong",{},"The entire structure exists to route information.",[25,40,42],{"id":41},"what-block-is-actually-building","What Block Is Actually Building",[10,44,45],{},"Here's where it gets interesting. Most companies using AI today are giving everyone a co-pilot — making the existing structure work slightly better without changing it. Dorsey's after something different:",[47,48,49],"blockquote",{},[10,50,51,52,56],{},"We intend to replace what the hierarchy ",[53,54,55],"em",{},"does",". A company built as an intelligence, or mini-AGI.",[10,58,59],{},"Instead of treating a company as layers of people organizing themselves, they're applying something closer to neural network behavior to the definition of a company itself. And the first piece of evidence is telling — they need two things:",[61,62,63,70],"ol",{},[64,65,66,69],"li",{},[36,67,68],{},"A world model"," of the company's own operations",[64,71,72,75],{},[36,73,74],{},"Customer signal"," rich enough to make that model useful",[10,77,78],{},"This basically means: gather a massive amount of data and plug it into a model that can make sense of it all.",[25,80,82],{"id":81},"the-data-advantage","The Data Advantage",[10,84,85],{},"Dorsey makes a sharp observation about signal quality:",[47,87,88],{},[10,89,90],{},"People lie on surveys. They ignore ads. They abandon carts. But when they spend, save, send, borrow, or repay — that's the truth. Every transaction is a fact about someone's life.",[10,92,93],{},"Block sits on both sides of millions of transactions every day. The buyer through Cash App, the seller through Square. That gives their model something rare: a per-customer, per-merchant understanding of financial reality built from honest signal that compounds. More transactions mean a richer model, which drives more transactions.",[25,95,97],{"id":96},"the-dynamic-programming-parallel","The Dynamic Programming Parallel",[10,99,100],{},"This is where I started drawing parallels to my own work as a developer. When I'm working with Claude Code or any agentic engineering assistant, I tend to document the state of the application — markdown files explaining authentication flows, email notification systems, background data loading. These compact docs let me or an agent quickly understand how any system works.",[10,102,103,104,107],{},"But the problem is ",[36,105,106],{},"documentation gets desynced from code",". You implement changes, forget to update the docs, and now you've got stale information everywhere.",[10,109,110],{},"The alternative is what I'd call the \"dynamic programming\" approach: instead of maintaining a deterministic markdown file explaining how your one-time password flow works, you run an Explorer agent that aggregates all relevant code files and presents the answer at runtime, directly from the source of truth.",[10,112,113,116],{},[36,114,115],{},"I think this is exactly what Block is trying to do at the company level."," Instead of having product managers and middle managers writing documents about monthly leads and refund rates, they run a model that knows everything about every transaction. At runtime, it infers these things directly from the data.",[25,118,120],{"id":119},"the-intelligence-layer","The Intelligence Layer",[10,122,123],{},"This is the part that genuinely impressed me. Dorsey describes an intelligence layer that composes capabilities into solutions proactively:",[10,125,126,127,130],{},"A restaurant's cash flow is tightening ahead of a seasonal dip the model has seen before? The intelligence layer composes a short-term loan, adjusts the repayment schedule, and surfaces it to the merchant ",[53,128,129],{},"before they even think to look for financing",".",[10,132,133],{},"A Cash App user's spending pattern shifts in a way that suggests they've moved to a new city? The intelligence layer sets up direct deposit, activates boosted card categories for their new neighborhood, and creates a savings goal calibrated to their updated income.",[10,135,136,139],{},[36,137,138],{},"No product manager decided to build either solution."," The capabilities existed. The intelligence layer recognized the moment and composed them. That's a fundamentally different way of thinking about product development.",[25,141,143],{"id":142},"three-roles-replace-the-entire-hierarchy","Three Roles Replace the Entire Hierarchy",[10,145,146],{},"In practice, Block normalizes down to three roles:",[61,148,149,155,161],{},[64,150,151,154],{},[36,152,153],{},"Individual Contributors"," — deep specialists who build and operate capabilities. The world model provides the context that a manager used to provide, so ICs can make decisions without waiting to be told what to do.",[64,156,157,160],{},[36,158,159],{},"Directly Responsible Individuals (DRIs)"," — people who own specific cross-cutting problems for a set period. A DRI might own merchant churn in a specific segment for 90 days with full authority to pull resources from multiple teams.",[64,162,163,166],{},[36,164,165],{},"Player-Coaches"," — people who combine building with developing others. They still write code or build models. They also invest in the growth of people around them. They don't spend their days in status meetings and alignment sessions.",[10,168,169,170,173],{},"So are we essentially getting rid of stand-ups? No more daily syncs, no more one-on-ones with your manager? Does the model just ping you on Slack and say \"implement this by noon\"? Or does it just ",[53,171,172],{},"implement it itself"," and ask you to approve the PR?",[10,175,176],{},"I'm honestly not sure where the line is here. It feels like they're replacing a layer of managers with a single person who duplicates their knowledge across models that empower delivery. The old hierarchy's job — information routing — gets handled by the system. Everyone else gets a role much closer to the actual work.",[25,178,180],{"id":179},"company-as-a-service","Company-as-a-Service?",[10,182,183],{},"This is where my mind really started racing. If you can define a company's hierarchy using these models, is this eventually just a GitHub template repository? Want to start a company? Clone the repo. Scaled to a thousand employees? Clone this other repo and it handles your company for you.",[10,185,186],{},"The only things you'd actually need to figure out are your market differentiators, your unique selling points, your customer niche. But the boring operational bits — the accounting, the payroll, the status meetings, the priority negotiations — the system runs itself.",[47,188,189],{},[10,190,191],{},"Companies move fast or slow based on information flow. Hierarchy and middle management impede information flow.",[25,193,195],{"id":194},"will-it-actually-work","Will It Actually Work?",[10,197,198],{},"I was skeptical at first. How do you replace something that's survived for 2,000 years? But thinking about it through the lens of how agentic AI works — an orchestrator sending work to agents, agents calling tools with specific capabilities, tools returning data — the parallels are striking. The org chart starts looking a lot like an agent graph.",[10,200,201],{},"That said, I have real questions. Block already had significant layoffs, and while reportedly the severance was decent, how humane is a layoff when real people are losing their jobs? Dorsey himself admits they're in early stages and \"parts of it will likely break before they work.\"",[10,203,204,205,130],{},"The key insight he leaves us with: if your company doesn't have deep, compounding understanding of something genuinely hard to understand, then AI is just a cost optimization story. You cut headcount, improve margins for a few quarters, and eventually get absorbed by something smarter. But if you do have that deep understanding, AI doesn't just augment your company — ",[36,206,207],{},"it reveals what your company actually is",[10,209,210],{},"Is this the future of how all companies work? Are we going to realize that these organizational structures survived 2,000 years for a valid reason? I don't know. But everything's changing, and I'm genuinely excited to see what happens next.",{"title":212,"searchDepth":213,"depth":213,"links":214},"",2,[215,216,217,218,219,220,221,222],{"id":27,"depth":213,"text":28},{"id":41,"depth":213,"text":42},{"id":81,"depth":213,"text":82},{"id":96,"depth":213,"text":97},{"id":119,"depth":213,"text":120},{"id":142,"depth":213,"text":143},{"id":179,"depth":213,"text":180},{"id":194,"depth":213,"text":195},"2026-04-05T16:01:30Z","Jack Dorsey wants to replace corporate hierarchy with AI, and his plan is more concrete than you'd expect.","md",{},true,"\u002Fblog\u002Fai-just-killed-middle-management",{"title":5,"description":224},"blog\u002Fai-just-killed-middle-management","Tech","\u002Fblog\u002Fai-just-killed-middle-management.png","https:\u002F\u002Fyoutu.be\u002Frd8Xb4LCWlw","vrtE5OT5NutMEsYpT5W3Hk-iKswWkN0kzo5Qqfy_gA8",1775411755756]