Are We All Managers Now?

Dan, Angie Jones, and Demetrios Brinkman open with a discussion of the Agentic AI Foundation ("AAIF"), founded by Anthropic, OpenAI, and Block in December 2025 and now home to roughly 180 member companies. AAIF recently launched an ambassador program (apply [here](https://aaif.io/ambassadors/)) and has upcoming events across the globe from [AGNTCon](https://events.linuxfoundation.org/agntcon-mcpcon-north-america/) in San Jose to gatherings in Amsterdam, India, Tokyo, and Seoul.

A recurring theme is that the whole industry is learning agentic engineering together. So get out of your "lab" and compare notes! You don't have to do all of this R&D on your own (well, maybe some of it, but it doesn't hurt to collaborate).

Everything is changing. And quickly. Angie marks the release of Claude Opus 4.5 as when agentic engineering became viable. Where engineers once obsessed over context engineering and priming a repo so an agent had a chance, the latest frontier models often just need to be pointed at a codebase and told the problem.

Drawing on her time leading agentic AI at Block, Angie describes the agent they build that can hold a world model across 25,000 codebases. They paired this agent with cloud workstations where an agent picks up a Jira ticket, clones the repo, and opens a PR without anyone babysitting a terminal.

With this kind of firepower comes new problems that look less like coding and more like management. Demetrios argues the unglamorous topic of governance — keeping teams aligned, codifying security practices, deciding what belongs in "the harness" — are the new challenges companies are grappling with. Sandboxes and cloud workers have gone mainstream.

The group pushes back on the wave of AI-justified layoffs, worrying that companies are cutting the very mentorship and middle-layer "glue" needed to steer agents. They also dig into tokenomics: budgets blown by mid-year, tools that can cost more than the engineer using them, and Angie's hard-won lesson at Block that getting 95% of engineers onto coding agents produced no velocity until she funded a small group of "AI champions" to learn the tools properly. Tokens, everyone agrees, are not the same as value.

As to what the group has found effective for agentic engineering, Angie makes the case for RPI (Research, Plan, Implement) from HumanLayer and for adversarial review. A 32-file refactor that earned a clean pass from Codex made her a believer. Alongside review skills, the [Council of Mine MCP server](https://github.com/block/mcp-council-of-mine), and Jesse Vincent's [Superpowers](https://github.com/obra/superpowers) skill pack; Dan adds Wes McKinney's [RoboRev](https://github.com/wesm/roborev) for continuous background review.

The episode closes on the human side: whether "we're all managers now," the identity crisis facing engineers who loved the craft, how Angie found the same flow state building agents that she once found writing code, and how all of this democratizes building…