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 SaaS survives as the governance and coordination layer — determinism still rules — deterministic rules governing non-deterministic agents.