Are We All Managers Now?
Listen to episode
About this episode
Dan, Angie Jones, and Demetrios Brinkman open on the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), founded by Anthropic, OpenAI, and Block in December 2025, now at roughly 180 member companies, with a new ambassador program and global events. Their throughline is that the industry is learning agentic engineering together, so engineers should compare notes rather than do all the R&D alone. Angie marks Claude Opus 4.5 as the inflection point: where engineers once obsessed over context engineering, frontier models can now be pointed at a codebase and handed a problem, and she describes a Block agent that holds a world model across 25,000 codebases and opens PRs from Jira tickets unattended. The hard problems shift from coding to management, with Demetrios framing governance and what belongs in "the harness" as the new frontier. The group pushes back on AI-justified layoffs that cut the mentorship needed to steer agents, and digs into tokenomics: blown budgets, tools costing more than their users, and Angie's lesson that velocity came only after funding a small group of "AI champions," since tokens are not value. On vibe-coding versus agentic engineering, Angie backs HumanLayer's RPI approach and adversarial review, citing a 32-file refactor that passed a clean Codex review, while Dan adds Wes McKinney's roborev. The episode closes on the human side: whether "we're all managers now," the engineer identity crisis, and how this democratizes building, before Dan concludes there is still no free lunch, but the price has come down, at least until the next model drops.
Guests
Angie Jones
- LinkedIn
Demetrios Brinkman
- Website
- LinkedIn
Links from the show
- Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF)
- AAIF Ambassador Program
- AGNTCon San Jose
Episode Deep Dive
- (00:00) - Welcome and introductions
- (01:49) - Inside the Agentic AI Foundation and the ambassador program
- (03:38) - A global slate of events and meetups
- (07:13) - What engineers are doing differently than six months ago
- (10:16) - Agentic engineering at enterprise scale and cloud workers
- (12:32) - Governance, the harness, and sandboxes
- (15:10) - Do we still need managers and the human 'glue'?
- (21:14) - The bill comes due: AI tool budgets
- (23:39) - Tokens aren't velocity and the 'AI champions' experiment
- (28:25) - Front-loading design versus vibe coding
- (30:15) - RPI and Codex as co-reviewer
- (34:15) - Adversarial review, Council of Mine, and Superpowers
- (39:34) - Robo Rev and the QA-agent pattern
- (42:58) - Agents, data analysis, and specifying the problem
- (46:33) - Are we all managers now?
- (48:00) - The Caveman skill and the limits of saving tokens
- (51:49) - Naming agents, Codex pets, and Quakpit
- (56:16) - Managing agents versus the joy of writing code
- (01:02:07) - Democratizing building and the falling price of software
Click here to view the episode transcript.
More AI podcast episodes
Browse all →Want to find AI jobs?
Join thousands of AI professionals finding their next opportunity