Not another jobs-apocalypse episode. NLW builds off a Boris Cherny tweet to sketch the new archetypes of agentic work — the prototypers, builders, sweepers, growers, and maintainers facing the product — then argues Cherny missed the outward-facing half of the org, and lands on the one move to future-proof yourself: become the maker for your function.
Jobs are becoming archetypes of agentic work, not fixed job descriptions.
As the meta-shift moves everyone from doing a job to managing agents that do it, roles are dissolving into archetypes that map to temperament more than title. Boris Cherny's five product-facing roles — prototyper, builder, sweeper, grower, maintainer — are a strong start, but NLW argues they miss the outward-facing positions (editor, scout, evangelist, orchestrator, conductor, risk steward) that face the people and signal around the work. And when making gets cheap enough, every function grows a maker — which is the surest short-term way to future-proof yourself.
NLW frames the whole episode around one underlying change — people exploring how much of what they do can be outsourced to teams of agents, then working backwards to figure out what substance of the role actually remains.
As with much in AI, a big part of what non-technical users are doing is looking at how technical users work and trying to translate that experience back onto their own types of roles.
— Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code. Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code, laid out five roles on the Claude Code team: the prototyper, the builder, the sweeper, the grower, and the maintainer — noting these aren't tied to job function, and that a healthy team needs a mix depending on where the product is in its life cycle.
The common thread is that all five positions face inward toward the artifact being built, and their order roughly traces a product's life cycle. Different combinations are needed depending on whether a product is pre-PMF, growing, or has strong product-market fit.
With code-generating agents, taking the first steps toward an idea gets vanishingly simple — so the prototyper isn't just generating ideas, they're cutting the time-consuming discussion phase down to directed conversations had while looking at something real and tangible.
The prototyper archetype isn't constrained to product builders. People who have never touched a product are now thinking about how they could build their own tools to make their work easier — pushing the shape of what their function can actually do.
NLW sees these as both distinct phases a single person moves through and, at the organizational level, likely different personality archetypes — the considerations for production-grade work (security, bugs, robustness) are exactly the ones the prototyping brain turns off around.
The sweeper isn't just fixing the builder's mistakes — that's arguably integral to building. The distinguishing trait is thinking on an almost DNA level about how to optimize and improve, a different temperament from the idea person or the hardened builder.
The grower takes a built-and-optimized product and iterates it toward product-market fit or domination. Almost by definition this can't be purely internal — it requires the product interacting with its intended audience, with those learnings feeding back into the work.
Anyone inside a big enterprise knows maintaining an existing system is an entirely different set of work, skills, and dispositions from building something new — and that distinction persists into the agentic era.
Once you look outside the product organization, a whole category is missing. The first group faces the work and the artifact; the second — editor, scout, evangelist, orchestrator, conductor, risk steward — faces the people and signal around the work.
When it's cheap to get on base and the prototyper churns out a dozen ideas a week, the market's attention is still scarce. The editor is the person or mindset that selects and focuses energy on which prototypes deserve to be fully built — whether empirically or by gut.
Scouts are out in the world aggregating and distilling incoming signal to feed the prototypers. NLW notes this is a role many organizations will fill with agents, since absorbing and collating huge amounts of information is exactly what agents excel at.
More than marketing the thing, the evangelist gets the market to adopt the builders' worldview — through content, conversation, or community — owning the intersection of what happens internally and externally.
Orchestration operates on multiple levels — a skill everyone gains as they manage agents, and a critical layer in larger orgs for making disparate pieces work together as output surges. The conductor is a more specific version focused on managing teams of agents so their outputs stay coherent.
Agents dramatically raise the speed of iteration, creating and amplifying new risks. Rather than gatekeeping, the new risk steward anticipates what could derail a project several steps ahead and fixes it before the project gets there — a dynamic, forward-oriented role that separates orgs that keep moving fast from those that hit fits and starts.
In sales, the prototyper tests new pitches and offers, the builder turns winners into repeatable playbooks, the sweeper prunes dead scripts and bad-fit segments, the grower iterates on deal velocity and expansion in the real world, and the maintainer sustains pipeline discipline and account coverage quarter after quarter.
The scout reads audience and competitors, the prototyper tries new narratives and channels, the editor uses taste to pick the best-fitting stories, the builder turns sparks into campaign machines, the sweeper kills weak messaging and channel bloat, and the grower obsesses over conversion data — with the grower's exhaust feeding the scout's next round.
Finance, ops, and HR won't map cleanly to all archetypes — they concentrate on maintainers (the back office is already the maintainer of the org's core functions), sweepers, risk stewards, and orchestrators, while inherently external-facing roles like grower and scout fit less well.
A back-office person can now build a small piece of custom software for a specific expense-reporting exception instead of filing a ticket and waiting a quarter. That's prototyping — and product thinking infiltrating every part of the org.
NLW's practical advice: if you're deep inside a function, bring prototyping into what you do — not because your org will replace SaaS with custom software, but because building pushes the organization to see opportunities it didn't know it had and puts you at the center of the change reshaping the job.
NLW doesn't expect every role to change overnight, but thinking in terms of these archetypes — which likely translate to people's temperaments and dispositions — is valuable as part of the process of organizational change and exploration.