Shipper proposes a two-tier organizational structure: Deputies are personal agents that “promote you out of your current job” — you teach it, it’s yours, and it takes over your role. Sheriffs are higher-permission agents managing access, setting rules, and orienting new agents across the organization. This maps directly to Treat AI like a distributed team, not a single assistant — instead of one central AI system, you have a distributed team of specialized agents with clear authority hierarchies.
The Deputy/Sheriff model also solves the coordination problem from Parallel agents create a management problem, not a coding problem by introducing explicit management roles. Specialization develops naturally based on user expertise. The Sheriff role is essentially the agent equivalent of When non-deterministic AI feeds a deterministic system, the deterministic layer governs — software that owns coordination and accountability keeps its place — deterministic rules governing non-deterministic agents.