Use AI at work? You might be a manager and not even know it.
Philip Su is on the frontline of AI. He worked at OpenAI until 2025, when he left to found his startup, Superphonic. Before that, he worked at Microsoft and Meta.
In January, Su made a provocative claim on Substack: “AI Killed the Individual Contributor.”
Su wrote that software engineers are asked to perform tasks once reserved for managers: set priorities, resolve conflicts, and give feedback. Rather than building, they’re spending time “pondering and tweaking the machine that builds the thing.”
“The halcyon days of the IC are over,” Su wrote. “Not because AI codes better than you, but because maximizing your productivity necessitates focusing your time on all the things that are, at the end of the day, manager tasks.”
Su doubled down this week on the podcast “A Life Engineered.” He said the IC role was “probably over” because engineers were delegating their work to AI.
If everyone’s a manager (of AI), do we need managers (of humans) anymore? Su said yes. There’s a “human coordination problem” that AI cannot solve, he said.
Su’s theory of managerial takeover comes amid the “great flattening” in Big Tech. Flat org charts are all the rage: few managers, many ICs. Elon Musk’s companies are known for their lack of managers; Amazon and Meta have recently culled management layers as they aim to increase their IC-to-manager ratios.
Meanwhile, tech CEOs are also embracing “founder mode.” The reviled opposite of that, according to Paul Graham’s 2024 essay, is “manager mode.”
But maybe managers are back en vogue — so long as they’re managing AI agents. Vercel COO Jeanne DeWitt Grosser told Business Insider that companies will see a new role: the “agent manager.”
The tools will get better, too. Su already finds that he has to review AI-written code “less carefully” than he used to.
“It might currently feel like managing a team of barely-competent interns,” he wrote in his essay. “It’ll soon feel like managing a team of very high performers, each better, faster, and smarter than you.”
