Refactoring Orgs

Large teams produce mediocre software. This is not new. What is new is that a large team is no longer the price of shipping something meaningful. A single developer with modern AI tooling can now ship what fifty could ship ten years ago, and that one person can ship it without any of the political drag that fifty people generate.

The result is that quality has a new address. It lives in the projects run by one person who cares, not in the projects run by fifty people who negotiate. The one person does not have to translate. Does not have to defend. Does not have to compromise the interaction on account of a stakeholder who never uses the product.

That one person who cares does not scale. It never has - and that is the point. Care is now cheap and powerful enough to ship on its own. That is what has changed through Agentic Coding.

Before AI, you could count yourself lucky if you had 2-3 people who cared for every 50 team members. Those 2-3 people who really cared were what was needed to produce software that still felt crafted, and opinionated, in any larger organization.

Now, that rate will not get you anywhere. Percentage-wise, you are going to need a lot more people who really care. They are going to have to work in different organizational boundaries. They will need better direction and goals. They will need more alignment and a different leadership culture. Because they care. Because they are opinionated. Because they are more powerful and faster to execute.

The best software of the next decade will be written by an opinionated person who cares.