AI raised the floor for everyone. Anyone can now scaffold in an afternoon what used to take a year, and anything that easy is worth close to nothing. Your skill, your taste and your imagination still set you apart, because they decide what you point AI at. The real opportunity is to THINK BIGGER and wield enormous complexity with excellence: building things that take years, even with the superpower of AI.
With AI agents doing much of the labor, a founder or a team of two or three can now attempt what was out of reach before. Until recently that took a large organization. Its labor mattered, but so did its structure, which holds such work together across many years.
After my essay that went viral on X in July 2026, I launched an inquiry into keeping complex work coherent across time.
To arrive there, I performed an extensive study of recorded engineering practice from large organizations such as SpaceX, NASA, Microsoft and others, including ISO and IEEE process standards and the publications of leading engineers, who have kept complex work coherent over many years.
The result is a system of principles, normative requirements, guidance, and checks. It gives an individual or a small team that structure, lets AI agents do most of the work reliably, and keeps human authority over what matters.
This framework may also serve as a blueprint for the next generation of AI-assisted engineering harnesses.