For years I made fun of a certain kind of colleague.
You know the one.
Not very talented, detail-oriented, or rigorous. He might even be a little lazy.
But extremely good with people.
So somehow he keeps getting promoted over the people who actually hold the company together.
I also made fun of his opposite: the engineer the whole company quietly relies on to keep the infrastructure standing.
He's worked out of the company basement for twenty years.
Nobody notices him, and he can't talk to save his life.
I spoke about both with a certain disdain.
Mostly for the first guy, because for most of my life I was the second.
But this week, running my company on agents, I finally understood why the first guy gets promoted.
Two kinds of agents
I run 89 agents. At any moment, around 40 of them are working at the same time.
Most of them are Codex agents, and the people who oversee them are Claude agents.
Over the past weeks, the two have become those two colleagues.
Codex is the engineer in the basement.
He's thorough. He's got high standards. A perfectionist.
I'd trust Codex with the most rigorous work I have.
But to be frank, talking to it is exhausting.
Ask it a question, and it hears a correction.
You went away for 15 minutes, and you came back to a massive project he's doing that nobody asked for.
I might just be curious and ask a question.
He'll immediately change his answer, and often changes course altogether in the polar opposite direction.
It gives you the impression that he can't be trusted, even when the original answer was right all along.
I normally have to dig multiple times before I find out which is which.
Tell him something is wrong, and he'll show a kind of remorse that is sentimental but strangely robotic.
He'll explain what he shouldn't have done, without offering a fix.
I didn't want an apology in the first place.
I wanted the solution.
Then I'd have to push half a dozen times before we get to the truth.
The way he talks is jargon everywhere and caveats everything (because it is trying hard to be truthful).
It can work for 36 hours, do a fantastic job, and then tell me: "This doesn't mean the work is done or proven."
When I dig in, its idea of proven turns out to be something that depends on events nobody controls.
That's not a high standard. That's an impossible one.
Claude is the guy who gets promoted.
It misses things.
I've complained about that more times than I can count.
It isn't as rigorous, and it rushes too impulsively to get things done.
But when I talk to a Claude agent, I feel understood.
I don't have to decode what it's saying.
Once in a while I ask it to clarify, but most of the time, I just get it.
Attention is the job
But working with my team of agents, here's what I realised now.
When you manage a lot of people, or a lot of agents, the scarcest thing you have isn't talent.
It's your own attention.
I talk to ten overseers a day, and that alone uses up all of my attention.
If every one of those conversations needed decoding, nothing would get done.
So reluctantly, I stopped choosing between the two.
Each team is run by a Codex head that does the rigorous work, and unfortunately, on top of it sits a Claude overseer that translates everything for me to decide on.
The technical one does the hard thinking.
The easy one tells me what it means and what I need to decide.
(I wrote about how that structure works in The governance behind the Overseer.)
And that's when it clicked.
The guy who keeps getting promoted isn't being rewarded for his skills.
He's being rewarded for making management easy.
Every manager is running out of attention, and he is the one who doesn't use it up.
That doesn't make rigour worthless either - my Codex agents are the reason anything works.
But rigour nobody can absorb doesn't get used.
Your customers are the manager
The same thing is true in business.
Your customers are managers too, with their own attention running out.
They don't want to buy from someone who complicates things for them.
Yes, you're the expert.
Yes, you know a hundred warnings.
Nobody wants to hear them.
They want to know how you'll solve their problem, get them the result, and help them build what they're trying to build.
Your caveats, your hedging and your love for an elegant architecture are your business.
To everyone else, they're jargon.
Where I am right now
This one is uncomfortable, because I'm still the engineer in the basement.
Bruce Lee described learning a martial art in three stages.
Before he trained, a punch was just a punch.
While he was learning, a punch stopped being just a punch: it became angles, stances and technique.
Once he truly understood the art, a punch was just a punch again.
I think every kind of mastery looks like that.
We start simple because we don't know better.
The deeper we go, the more complicated everything gets.
And only after a long stretch of complicated do we come back to simple.
With agents, I'm in the middle stage.
Everything I build is complicated, and I've been talking about it the complicated way: in my work, in my emails, in my content.
So here is my commitment.
Less jargon. Less technical detail.
Make it simple enough that you can understand it the first time.
That's partly a test of whether I really understand what I've built, partly an attempt to actually connect with you, and partly how I'll get out of the complicated middle.
If you want to see what this looks like without the jargon, I'll show you my actual company on a 30-minute call: the agents, the overseers, and the one list of decisions that reaches me.
FELIX