If you're building an AI-native company right now, the hardest question isn't what your agents can do — it's what you're supposed to do while they're doing it. Greg Brockman worked that out the hard way at Stripe, and his thinking translates almost uncomfortably well.
Brockman's essay on figuring out the CTO role at Stripe is essentially a dispatch from someone who had to stop being the best person in the room and start being the person who made the room work. The job, he found, wasn't deep individual contribution — it was leverage: setting technical standards, building the culture that outlasts any single hire, and creating the tools that let other engineers make good decisions without needing him in the loop. The title is yours to define or to waste.
Swap engineers for agents and the logic sharpens painfully fast. You are not the best coder on your team anymore — your agents are, on throughput at least. So your actual job is what Brockman identified: the standards agents operate under, the culture of review and judgment your human team brings to agent output, and the scaffolding that lets good decisions happen without you approving every run. If you haven't defined that role deliberately, you haven't really defined your company. You've just automated drift.
- Define your leadership role explicitly or your agents will expose the vacuum
- your leverage now lives in the standards and culture you set, not the code you write
- the tools you build for human judgment over agent output are the actual product of your technical leadership.
