As someone that pivoted to agentic work and quit the job that tried to get the existing team to do agentic work:
All companies are structuring like this, and some are more equipped to do it than others
Basically the executive team realizes the corporate hierarchy is too rigid for the lowly engineers to surface any innovation or workflow adjustments above the AI anxiety riddled middle management and bandwagon chaser’s desperate plea for job security, and so the executive creates a team exempt from it operating in a new structure
Most agentic work impacts organizations that are outside of the tree of that software/product team, and there is no trust in getting the workflow altered unless a team from upon high overwrites the targeted organization
we are at that phase now, I expect this to accelerate as executives catch on through at least mid-summer 2026
It's not even a new thing... re Skunkworks. It's completely natural for new/developing technology to be formed in new organizations separate from incumbered corporate bureaucracy. iirc, IBM did this with the PC, that later languaged under the bureaucrats, and there are many others over the past half century.
I think the biggest issue with Meta here, is how much visibility they have to adjacent orgs, which is not too surprising given the expenditures, but still surprising. It should be a separate unit and the expenses absolutely thought of as separate from the rest of the org(s).
Sounds like DOGE, a resounding success!
yes, exactly like DOGE, even named a such within some orgs
Lots of siloed processes tied together in a simple way neglected for decades solely because the political capital and will didn’t exist
Which orgs?
Honestly the comment is so poorly written I can't figure out what the GP is trying to say. They think agent coding is going to replace all existing coding because the only reason manual coding is hanging on is because engineers can't convince middle management to let them use it?
in my experience it's management forcing agent workflows on reluctant senior engineers who are afraid to speak up about how poor the tools are, as it would be career suicide to argue that agentic workflows are anything less than the inevitable future.
Isn't there something wrong with that? I have extreme suspicion towards any tech or movement that is forced top down. How can we know the effectiveness of these tools if only praising voices are allowed? Why is the inevitability of this tech a foregone conclusion?
The critical voices are self censoring