When the system routes information, IC and DRI are the only roles left

If humans are no longer the conduit for information moving up and down a hierarchy, the layer whose whole job was that conduit has no remaining function. Blomfield says it plainly: no middle management, no layers of directors and VPs. Two roles survive. The individual contributor — everyone actually doing the work, and turning up to meetings with working prototypes rather than decks. And the DRI, a single person whose head is on the block for an outcome, which he calls the biggest thing most companies are missing. His counter-example is from working at a bank: a committee for everything, and it grinds things to a halt.

The claim only holds given the substrate — it is a consequence of Humans move to the edge where the model touches reality — a company brain that can't touch the world is just a database and of If an action left no artifact, it didn't happen — legibility is the precondition, not a nice-to-have, because routing can only move into the system once the system can read everything. The prototype-not-deck standard is the org-level expression of AI compresses the distance between idea and execution but not between good and bad judgment: when building a working version is cheap, presenting a description of one stops being evidence of anything. Read alongside Cap headcount, not compute — token spend per engineer replaces headcount as the scaling unit, which supplies the budget mechanics, and When products and models converge, the moat is the institution — how a company attracts people, distributes authority and compounds judgment, which argues the resulting shape is itself defensible. Worth holding against Institutional slowness is the runway, not the threat — the committees that grind things to a halt are exactly the drag that gives newcomers their window.