Your org chart is a fossil record of one belief that stopped being true three years ago: writing code is hard and engineers are scarce.
That belief is load-bearing. It built the coordination layers, the approval gates, the tools for slow pipelines. Roughly 30 to 50 percent of a traditional team's effort goes to managing the cost of expensive engineers.
Then the cost collapsed. A task that took ten hours now takes ten minutes. A large enterprise scoped a modernization project at 10 engineers and 12 months. Two engineers with Codex shipped it in three days.
Here is the part the org chart can't show you. Cursor passed $4B in ARR with one of the smallest teams in software history, the fastest zero-to-billions run ever recorded. Codex runs 10 to 12 product surfaces with two PMs, one designer, and a single pod of engineers. Each of those surfaces would be a 15 to 20 person squad at a normal company.
Read that as cost-cutting and you miss it. The build is nearly free now, so the same headcount does 5x more, and the only scarce thing left is judgment about what is worth building.
The companies in the most danger feel the safest. They bought the tools and rebuilt the old process around them: same gates, same squads, same ceremonies, now with an agent bolted on.
The belief is gone. The structure it justified is still standing. That gap is the whole opportunity.
Aakash Gupta (@aakashgupta)
The product operating model is dead.
AI killed it. Here's what replaced it, with Rohan Varma (first PM at Cursor, now PM on Codex).
🔗: news.aakashg.com/p/ai-produc…
— https://nitter.net/aakashgupta/status/2067360449033637916#m