I Was Wrong About Managing AI Agents
The dot and the Swarm: Benefitting from the bitter lesson
I thought organizing AI agents would require careful human design, but the Bitter Lesson struck again. OpenAI's swarm of thousands of agents solved the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem in 88 hours, exchanging 2.7 million messages with minimal human coordination. Agents don't suffer the human problems that make management hard—no turf wars, no free-riding. This changes how easily they can be integrated into companies.
This is the Bitter Lesson applied to the org chart. The organizational problem I thought would take years of careful human design was largely solved by models that are better at organizing.