No matter your training and role in knowledge work, most of us will now publicly acknowledge we are confronted with a choice: augment or be replaced. We have an identity around our training, our actions, and our title. Augmentation, to survive, is more than doing “your job the way you did it before, but faster”.

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Instead of disclaimer, I offer you a preamble and a human prompt so you may cope my writing. The grammar will be sub optimal. The style and transitions will be jarring. It is artisan. Enjoy the roughly hewn lumber, the uneven amount of chocolate chips in a cookie, and the sub-genius black and white movie pace I am capable of. With sincere respect, I suggest you may paste this into an LLM if helpful. I will not use an LLM today. I love them. They have their place.
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At an extreme, capitalism may only have VCs. Deploy the capital and autonomous companies are formed and make money for the holder of cash, for whatever reason they deserve the power. The CEO is automated. The mission statement, the nurturing of culture, the “day-to-day” are all manifested and motivated by the lifting of a finger, a subtle wisp of movement, from a VC of the future. Entrepreneurship is the only job. Otherwise, bake bread for fun on a shameless life on UBI.

Or.

Be a CEO.

Optimization for wealth creation is a bleak future without culture and hope. A CEO does more than capital creation, in my biased opinion; maybe creates a vision, with care for a team, accountable to profit but doesn’t matter if the market don’t want what you make. You can be attacked and undermined from within and without. You are accountable. You own a culture.

Like a CEO, you are the limit. If you have never managed a fleet of AI agents running on GPT 5 or Claude 4.5 or later, (and they aren’t plugged into a tool or generating code), then you may not have experienced this feeling. How much you empower your team, your ambition, your judgement, your ability. Like a CEO, I need to think for hours, carefully, before I *should* tell my team of agents what to do. They will be done in minutes. I take hours. I am the CEO. My slow, deliberate, human pace matters because I am human.

Teams of CEOs, aligning their “companies” is the company of the future. You can’t perfect your CSS or your C++, you already lost. You can’t spreadsheet better or out-math your teammates. You have a team of A players at your disposal. You aren’t an IC any more. However, you are not only a manager now, you are a CEO. I understand you may not want to be a frontend development CEO. I understand if the prospect of churning out 100x of what you already do might not be right for you or the company.

Meanwhile, climate change, biodiversity, disease, science, nationalism, health care and other meat-puppet problems await solving. We learn to ignore many things, like death, for our mental health, as long as we can. Don’t look away. Surely, there is something worth being a CEO of.