# The Job Positions of the AI Future — Transcript (2026-07-05)

https://aidailybrief.ai/e/2026-07-05 · Listen: https://pod.link/1680633614

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[00:00:00] Today on the AI Today on the AI Daily Brief, the job the job positions of this new agentic future. The The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, Robots and Pencils, All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, Robots and Pencils, Retool, Blitzy, and Airtable

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Welcome backToday we are once again turning to the future of jobs this episode is not about exploring what industries or types of roles are going to be displaced by AI.



Nor is it exactly like my episode from a month or two ago about the entirely net new roles that are going to be created by AI. Instead, this one is about new ways of working and some patterns that people are starting to observe [00:01:00] about how the roles of jobs are changing as we get deeper into AI.



now obviously a lot of this is predicated on the meta shift from doing a job to managing agents that do that job. That I think is going to be a big part of the common shift for all roles, is a process of people exploring how much of what they do on any given day or in any given week can be more effectively outsourced to teams of agents that actually do the execution

And then working backwards from that, what is the actual substance of the role that remains?

Likewise, as with a lot in AI, a big part of what us non-technical users are doing is looking over at the developers and technical users and trying to map their experience back onto the types of roles that we have now this particular episode was inspired by a very specific tweet from Cloud Code creator Boris Cherny

At the end of last month, he wrote, " As engineering, product design, DS, et cetera, melt into a new kind of role, I was reflecting on what roles might look like in the future. For example, when I look at the Claude Code team, [00:02:00] I see what I think is five archetypes. One, the prototyper, comes up with brand-new ideas, churns out many ideas, most of which don't ship.

Two, the builder, quickly turns a prototype idea into production-grade product and infrastructure. Three, the sweeper, cleans up the UI, simplifies the code and system, unships, optimizes performance. Four, the grower, takes a product that has been built and iterates on it to improve product-market fit.

Five, the maintainer, owns a mature system to make it secure, reliable, fast, and efficient as it scales. Many people span across two roles and sometimes three roles. I also noticed that these roles are not really tied to job function. E.g., across Anthropic, some designers match category one, some two, some three.

Same for engineers, PM, DS. A healthy team needs a mix of these depending on the product. A product that is new and pre-PMF needs people that are strong at one, two, and three, prototyper, builder, and sweeper. A product that is growing and has found product-market fit needs two, three, and four, builder, sweeper, grower, and some five, [00:03:00] maintainer.

A product that has strong product-market fit needs three plus four plus five, sweeper, grower, maintainer, and some two, builder. Maybe product roles of the future will look more like this and less like the domain-specific roles of today." Now this is one of those great posts that's detailed enough to dig into, but also open enough and exploratory enough to build off from.

And so what I wanted to do is go a little bit deeper into each of these five roles try to apply it to areas outside of engineering and product work, and then look at what I think might be missing

Now, so one common thread In all of the positions outlined by Boris is that they are product-facing. In other words, they more or less face inward, connected to the product that is being built

The order is also a rough life cycle of a product. Boris even articulates how different teams need different combinations of these things based on where in the product's life cycle the product is



So So let's talk about each of these five work-facing roles

the prototyper is a role that many of you



inhabit on a fairly regular basis

This is a person who is generating brand new [00:04:00] ideas and using things like Claude Code and Codex to do the first version of them

Now historically, the knock on the idea person was that ideas were free and it was all about execution

Now Now what execution means, I think

is getting a little bit different as taking the first steps towards bringing that idea to life gets vanishingly simpler in the context of code-generating agents



and what's interesting about the archetype of the prototyper

Is that while obviously Boris is talking about it in the context of the actual product team, this is not at all constrained to product builders. In fact, increasingly, the capability of using agents to prototype and build things means that product style thinking is infiltrating other parts of the organization

People who have never touched a product before are thinking about how they could build their own products or tools to make whatever it is that they're doing easier



but the prototyper isn't just valuable because they figure out how to solve problems using code



but also because they're pushing the shape of what their function can actually do

The prototyper cuts down what used to be an endless discussion [00:05:00] phase into much more directed and applied conversations based on looking at something real In other words, the prototyper isn't just coming up with new ideas

They're also eliminating an entire step in the conversation, which can be extraordinarily time-consuming



because that conversation can now be had while looking at something real and tangible

Next up we have the builder

This is someone who can take that prototype and turn it into something that is more production grade. Now, production grade is going to have different meanings in the context of a public-facing product versus an internal-facing tool. Obviously, a public-facing product is going to have a much higher burden or threshold on everything from security to bugs to whatever.

Internal tools are gonna have inherently a lot more forgiveness built in Now, one thing that's interesting to consider is how much the archetypes of prototype and builder are actually different people versus different mindsets within the same person.

I think this is fascinating 'cause I feel like I could argue both sides fairly compellingly. On the one hand, My guess is that many of you have gone through processes where you are both of these things at different points. You prototype at first, use that to generate the conversation that you need to have about [00:06:00] the decisions that need to be made, and then move into this builder mode.

However, at the same time, I do think that there is a little bit of a dispositional difference between people who are inclined to find themselves as prototypers versus builders

The things that you need to care about when moving into production grade are very different than the considerations when you were in that prototyping stage

I can tell this because they're basically all the things that my brain instantly turns off around and stops caring about as soon as they happen and yet when it comes to the real world of real artifacts that people are going to interact with, there is obviously a much higher threshold that needs to be met. And so yes, although I think that many people are going to inhabit prototyper and builder at various points in the journey I do think as we zoom out to the organizational level, These might be different personality archetypes

Now when it comes to the sweeper, I think the key word is optimize I don't think that what Boris is trying to say is that this is a person who just cleans up the mistakes of the builder. And And in fact, I sort of think that if you were to push on trying to combine any of these roles into a single one, sweeping kind of feels [00:07:00] like just an integral part of building.

The word optimize is where I think that perhaps changes. It's one thing to clean up the UI or simplify the code. It's another thing to think on an almost DNA level about how to optimize things and improve them. And again, if we're starting to map these position archetypes into personality archetypes, the person who is really designed for optimization is also different than the person who's good at building in a hardened way or coming up with lots of ideas

By the way, I think this will be even more apparent in some areas outside of product development, which we'll get into in a little bit Now, what's interesting Now, what's interesting about the next role, the grower is that this is where what has so far been a largely work-facing, internal-facing set of positions, roles, and archetypes starts to turn outward to the rest of the world the growers are the people who take the thing that is already built and even starting to be optimized by the sweeper, and instead is iterating on it

towards an even better version which could mean product market fit

or product market domination. Now, this is a role that almost definitionally cannot exist entirely in that internal-facing way. the [00:08:00] grower is doing things where the product as it exists is interacting with its intended audience, and the learnings from that are what goes back into the grower's work preview of what I'm going to argue in a minute, I think that the biggest thing missing from Boris's analysis is those externally facing roles, and this is kind of a hint towards that 

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Lastly, the maintainer.

Anyone who's ever worked inside a big enterprise knows that there is a massive categorical difference in maintaining a mature system that already exists versus building something new. it is an entirely different set of work, an entirely different set of dispositions, an entirely different set of skills.

And what we're seeing with Boris' analysis is that while the context might be changing and the [00:11:00] mechanism of the job might be changing, that orientation towards maintaining a big system as something that is different than building the system in the first place continues and persists into this new agentic era paradigm

Okay, but as I hinted, I think this is a really interesting and valuable analysis. I think this is a great way to b- break down a lot of what a lot of particularly small, nimble teams are feeling as the slate of different roles, especially that go into the products that they're building

But once you start to look especially outside of the product organization, it becomes really clear really fast that there is almost a totally different orientation that's missing in Boris' analysis And yet the idea that roles are changing such that they are increasingly less

about a specific narrow job description and instead about archetypes and instead about archetypes and categories of agentically enabled work persists even into the second category. If the first group of positions were the ones that face the work, the ones that interact with the artifact, the second group of positions, the ones that I think are missing [00:12:00] from Boris' analysis, the ones that I think aren't explored with Boris' analysis, are those that face a little bit more externally.

They face the people and the signal around the work So let's talk about a few different examples One is the editor

So what happens when the prototyper makes a dozen different ideas over the course of a week? whose role is it to decide which they should pursue? even or especially in a world where it's increasingly cheap to get on base

Figuring out which projects you actually want to let run becomes even more important



the attention of the market is still scarce, and you can't try everything, and that's where the editor comes in. the editor archetype is the person or people, or simply mindset that helps decide which of the many prototypes deserve to be built.

Now importantly

Recognizing the editor as a role does not prescribe what approach they might take to making those decisions about which of the many prototypes deserves to be fully built. Some editors are going to be empirical, some are going to be gut-based what's common Is that the selector

And focuser of the energy around a particular option once those prototypes exist, [00:13:00] is going to be an increasingly important role Now, part of what might inform the editor's work is the work of the scout

Where do those prototype ideas come from in the first place? In many, if not most cases, they're going to come through interaction with the real world. Now, sometimes, if not many times, it'll be the prototyper themselves who's out observing things who has the spark of the ideas that get built into that prototype.

But especially as we move into larger and larger organizations and we think systematically about how organizations might redesign themselves

The idea of a role whose job is specifically to be out in the world aggregating and exploring the signal coming in, and then bringing it back into the organization for the prototypers and others to start building upon, you can see as something that could be increasingly important

Now, scouting might also be something that in many organizations is largely agentic One of the things that agents are really good at is absorbing

collating and distilling huge amounts of information, which is kind of what the job of a scout is. Now, that doesn't necessarily speak to the taste that might be involved in scouting

But it's interesting to note that this is a role that I think in many organizations will be [00:14:00] filled by agents, not just people

The next archetype, which is already admittedly a role that many organizations have, is evangelist. These are the folks who don't just market the thing, but actually get the market to see the world in the same way that the builders see the world

be, this person's output might sometimes be around content, it might sometimes be around conversation, it might sometimes be around community



But this is the position that starts to own the intersection of what happens internally and what happens externally

Next up, a role that I think honestly could exist both as a work internal facing role, but also as an external facing role is the orchestrator. And what's interesting about this archetype is that orchestrators are going to function on multiple levels. I think to some extent, orchestration is a skill that everyone will have, even in the context of their own work, as they increasingly become managers of agents in addition to whatever they were before and yet especially in larger organizations, the orchestration layer of figuring out how all these new disparate pieces work together, especially as the work output increases dramatically, is going to be extremely important

Orchestrators that [00:15:00] live at the intersection, not just of these different role archetypes, but also of these different bundles of role archetypes across different parts of the organization are going to be increasingly important We could do an entire episode about what it means to be an orchestrator on a micro or a macro level and barely begin to scratch the surface of where I think this is heading

Now closely related, and honestly, I don't know if it should exactly be its own thing or something that's just bundled with Orchestrator is the Conductor This is a bit more specific to agent management instead of organizational management.



but the point is that if we view these teams of agents as actual synthetic or digital employees that need to be managed in some way and need to be made sure that their outputs can be coherent with one another The conductor is the version of an orchestrator that is focused specifically on that type of work



now now one final role that I think in particular is going to be extremely important, especially the larger the organization you get into or the more sensitive the area that its work relates to, is the risk steward

This is more than just a governance guideline sort of manager I think that one of the [00:16:00] implications of agents is that the speed at which all of us, even big organizations, can operate and iterate goes way up. That inherently, almost definitionally, is going to create new categories and new types of risk.

And/or it's going to amplify existing risks by having less time for organizations to adapt. The risk steward then becomes the archetypal position whose whole focus



is on greasing the governance gears of the system so that it doesn't get stopped and thrown off the tracks by a risk that got out of control Now interestingly, I think especially builders are often used to thinking about people who are focused on risk as the gatekeepers, the bottlenecks, the stoppers of work.

But work now in the agentic era has such an incredible momentum that I actually think it's exactly the opposite, that risk stewards in this new paradigm are the people who are trying to anticipate a couple steps down the line what things could derail the whole process and try to fix them before the project even gets there I actually think that this new agentic era risk steward is going to be an incredibly dynamic, forward-oriented role, and [00:17:00] the difference between organizations that continue to move fast versus move fast for a little bit and then have to deal with fits and starts and stops is going to be in this role

Okay, So now we've got this whole new set of positions, which as I mentioned, are sometimes going to be bundled together in a single person, and which in many ways represent archetypes of work as much as they do specific roles

Especially when it comes to the work-facing roles, the prototyper, the builder, the sweeper, the grower, the maintainer, it might be a little bit easier to visualize how they relate to software engineering or product design than how they might fit in other parts of the organization.



so let's look at these roles, but in a different area of the org, starting with sales. What would a prototyper look in the sales organization? Well, this might be a person who tests new pitches, segments, and offers

the idea person butenabled to take the first steps in a way that they never were before the builder or the archetypes who are gonna take some of those new pitches or segments or offers or whatever it is and turn it into a repeatable playbook that can scale across the entire sales organizations the sweepers are the folks who are going to go through

and cut [00:18:00] dead scripts or bag fit segments from the process

Basically, they're the one who are going to go prune the whole thing so that the velocity remains high



without less valuable work getting amplified



Within the range of options, they are going to optimize what the builder built

to make the public facing sales process as valuable as possible. now the grower in the sales organization is where all these offers and new approaches

and sales motions actually start to interact with the real world

They're the ones who are iterating to see how this strategy versus that strategy is performing and orienting the organization to what's working. They're thinking about deal velocity, expansion

And generally taking what's working and making it and expanding it significantly now as this whole sales process matures, The maintainer is the one who turns this into and then maintains a complete sales system, not just a bunch of new sales strategies

They are thinking about pipeline discipline and account coverage quarter after quarter So that's Boris' set of roles, but what about the more externally facing that we talked about? obviously the editor archetype has a role here. as you can see the sales prototyper coming up with just a ton of ideas [00:19:00] that might not actually be worth the squeeze the scout archetype is obviously incredibly valuable as sales is so inherently about how what you're doing internally interacts with the world externally.

Finding the signal that can inform the prototyper becomes even more important

And I think in the context of sales, something like the risk steward actually is really important as well sales motions can sometimes have a tendency to try to get the sale at any cost. and yet some costs, be they actual costs or PR costs or something else, are actually too high to bear.

And in this case, a risk steward can be thinking about those things Even in advance of where those issues might come up

I think marketing looks fairly similar

You've got the scout who's reading the audience, the culture, seeing what competitors are doing, and bringing those ideas as signals into the organization. The prototyper takes those signals and tries new narratives, campaigns, and channels

the editor uses taste and discernment to figure out which stories, which angles, which narratives best fit the brand as it is or where it wants to go

With the combination of these scout-informed prototypes refined by [00:20:00] the editor, the builder can take campaigns that are ready to mature. the builder can take the spark of ideas and turn them into real campaign machines

That creates the need for the sweeper, who's going to kill weak messaging and channel bloat, simplify the funnel, help prune and decide which channels aren't part of a particular campaign and generally focus the efforts on the areas of highest potential leverage The grower is the growth marketer who's obsessed with the data that's coming in, who isn't just using taste like the editor or broad signals like the scout, but is instead actually optimizing conversion, optimizing for growth, optimizing for costs

And by the way, the work that the grower is doing is deeply aligned with the next set of scout work that's going to happen as well

The exhaust that spins off the interaction between current and potential customers in the campaign is what the scout uses to inform the next set of ideas that the prototyper will prototype



and of course to ensure

that all of this adds up to more than just a single campaign, but an actual marketing system, you have the maintainers. Now, within the context of marketing, the maintainers might be everything from brand maintainers and really making sure that everything is aligned there, to systems [00:21:00] maintainers, the CRM, the lifecycle systems Every marketer knows the pain of having to start from scratch

Because the glue that kept the whole system together just wasn't there before.

Now, one important note is that these sets of archetypes and positions aren't going to map cleanly to every function They obviously were generated from the product and software development organization.



And I think that they have some pretty clear fits with the sales and marketing organizations. But what about something like the back office, where you've got finance, ops, and HR?

You might see in those areas concentration, a different type of concentration where, for example, you have fewer prototypers and builders and more maintainers

In fact, in some ways, back office you could argue is the maintainer of the core functions of the whole organization already. And so it makes sense that that's going to be a key part of what they do internally as well Now that said, some of these roles really do fit. The sweeper, which removes redundant tools, zombie budgets, and bad metrics.

Obviously, the risk steward is extraordinarily important in these sort of back office functions. Orchestrators who [00:22:00] actually make systems and data that can fit across teams are incredibly valuable

The grower, the scout that are inherently external facing don't make as much sense in these inherently internal facing roles And yet interestingly, as a final thought

In some cases, one of the impacts of this new agentic way of working will be that that even areas, that even archetypes that don't seem exactly like they fit

in an area like back office might start to fit more as they get their hands on agentic,tools and agentic ways of working. Let's take the prototyper. The prototyper doesn't exactly, or at least not cleanly, have as obvious a role in something like these back office functions. now I wouldn't say that there's no role.



obviously in any role, whether it's finance or HR or something else, people are constantly thinking about new and better ways to do their job, new tools they have access to, et cetera, and the prototyper can still be a valuable archetype in that context. But the idea of the prototyper as product builder might, in the future, have even more [00:23:00] resonance in something like finance or HR than you might think.

And this is where the product organization and product thinking starts to infiltrate the rest of the organization

We have now had tens of thousands of people go through AIDB Agent OS and the New Year's program and Claw Camp and Enterprise Claw and Executive Agent Leadership and Executive Catch-Up and the vanishing minority of them are in the product or software organization.

But they are taking product and software ideas and approaches and bringing them to their areas Picture a back office person writing a small piece of custom software to handle a very specific kind of expense report or expense reporting exception. It used to be that they would've had to file a ticket and wait a quarter, but now they can just build it themselves.

That is a form of prototyping, and to the extent that it works for their roles, could turn into building, growing, maintaining, et cetera

when making gets cheap enough, every function starts to grow a maker. and I think that if you are a person who is deep inside a specific function, one very good way to, at least in the [00:24:00] short term, future-proof yourself is to become the maker for that function in your organization.

To take the idea of prototyping and bring it into what you do. Not because your organization is all of a sudden going to use small pieces of custom software instead of SaaS tools for whatever it is that you do, but because by building things, you're going to be able to push your organization to think differently and realize that it has more opportunities than it even knew And in so doing, put yourself in an incredibly important role, not just when it comes to helping your organization do its job, but in terms of the essential organizational change that'll shape what the job is in the future

As I mentioned at the top of the show, the core change I think underlying all of this Is the shift to having access to agents

And being able to simply do more faster than was ever possible and to simply do more different things than was ever possible before

As that shift, as we experiment with what those shifts are going to mean, I do not think that all of a sudden overnight every single role [00:25:00] changes. But I do think that starting to think in terms of these different archetypes, which translate probably to personal, to people's, to people's personalities and temperaments, is going to be valuable as part of the process of organizational change and exploration

And so with that, I turn it over to you. I am super interested to hear if and how this resonates with or is contrasting with your experience in organizations as they're operating right now

One great place to come talk about this is the AIDB Operators community. I haven't been sharing it for a while, but it's up to about 2,500 different members talking a lot about this sort of organizational development work and other things.

You can find it at aidboperators.circle.so,

and I'll include a link in the show notes as well. Anyways, guys, we're gonna wrap it there and let you get back to your July 4th weekend. Big ups to Boris Cherny, not only for building a great product in Claude Code, but in constantly sharing how they're thinking about new ways of organizing work

And thanks as always to you guys for listening or watching Again, have a great weekend, and until next time, [00:26:00] peace 

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