Doctrine

Core Thesis

Technology roles are shifting from discrete execution to ontological orchestration: the definition, constraint, and sequencing of meaning in systems where execution is increasingly abundant.

Claims

1. Execution is no longer the dominant constraint

   For most software-driven organizations, the cost of producing artifacts (code, designs, drafts) is falling faster than the cost of deciding what should exist and how it should behave.

2. Architecture becomes ontological, not just structural

   The primary architectural work shifts from pipelines and components to shared ontologies: vocabularies, invariants, constraints, and mental models.

3. AI punishes vague thinking faster than humans do

   AI systems amplify ambiguity: unclear intent yields plausible but misaligned outcomes at higher velocity.

4. Authority shifts toward harness authorship and outcomes

   Organizational authority increasingly derives from defining effective harnesses and delivering outcomes, not positional hierarchy or execution volume.

5. Roles converge upward in greenfield and small-team contexts

   In greenfield, startup, and small-team contexts, AI makes narrowly defined execution functions economically obsolete faster than it creates new narrow roles, increasing demand for generalists with architectural judgment.

6. Roles bifurcate in large enterprise and regulated contexts

   In large enterprises and regulated industries, AI may produce role bifurcation rather than convergence: a smaller tier of elite generalists who define harnesses and systems, and a larger tier of commoditized execution roles whose tasks are increasingly AI-mediated and narrowly scoped.

7. Automating entry-level work narrows the senior-talent pipeline (broken bottom rung)

   When AI automates the entry-level tasks through which juniors historically built judgment, the pipeline that produces senior generalists can narrow — reducing long-run capability even when aggregate employment holds and no jobs are destroyed outright.

8. Safe autonomy requires seasoned intent and explicit validation

   Agent autonomy is viable only when direction, reasoning, and validation are established before execution and maintained during it through continuous, graded checkpoints rather than purely up-front gates.

Working Definitions

Ontological orchestration

Defining what exists, what matters, how components relate, and what constitutes correctness in a system—before and during execution.

Harness

A structured package of intent, constraints, artifacts, and validation mechanisms that bounds and guides execution (human or agentic).

Intent hypothesis

A falsifiable statement describing a believed problem, its context, constraints, and success criteria.

Situated authorship

Authorship determined by surface-area expertise and problem context rather than formal role.