If your agents are doing the work, the old "I'll just do it myself" instinct isn't a safety net anymore — it's a trap that scales to zero.
Greg Brockman's essay on figuring out the CTO role at Stripe is less a job description and more a field report from someone who had to unlearn the habit of being the smartest individual contributor in the room. The insight that sticks is that technical leadership is not a role you receive and fill — it is a role you construct, continuously, by choosing where your judgment creates the most leverage. That means shaping the standards other people build against, not racing to ship the next thing yourself.
The dynamic Brockman describes gets sharper and stranger when your team includes agents. If you reach in and fix the output yourself every time something goes wrong, you never build the eval, the guardrail, or the cultural norm that would have caught it. The founder's job becomes authoring the environment — the scaffolding, the taste, the criteria for good enough — not correcting individual runs. Leverage through standards matters more now, because agents will reproduce whatever environment you give them, faithfully and at volume.
- Define your role by where your judgment multiplies, not where your hands are fastest
- standards and evals are now the artifact you ship, not a nice-to-have on top of the artifact
- the instinct to just fix it yourself is the single most dangerous habit to carry into an agent-native workflow.
