Position A, Agents are a team you manage
- Operator: Claire Vo
- Card: Agents work when treated as a team, not a single super-tool, The unlock for AI agent productivity is management skill, not technical skill, Onboard agents the way you onboard an EA: progressive trust, named tiers
- Claim: Don't throw every task at one super-agent. Build one agent per role, each with its own context window, identity, and tool scope, and manage them like teammates. The unlock is management skill, not technical skill.
Position B, Agents are tools you give a goal and stay out of
- Operator: Boris Cherny
- Card: Give the model tools and a goal; do not hard-code the workflow, Underfund teams deliberately so AI substrate, not headcount, absorbs the work
- Claim: Give the model tools and a goal; do not hard-code the workflow. The right move is restraint: less scaffolding, less workflow, more abstraction. Underfund teams so substrate absorbs work; don't manage agents as headcount.
Conditions distinguishing them
- Loop type: Vo runs a 9-agent CPO operating loop where each agent has a specialised JTBD (writes PRDs, reviews dashboards, briefs stakeholders). Cherny is building a coding agent (Claude Code) where the user's job is one task and the agent figures out execution.
- Output structure: Vo's loops produce many heterogeneous artifacts that need consistent identities + tool scopes. Cherny's loops produce one homogeneous artifact (code change) where over-scaffolding limits the model's ability to discover its own path.
- Trust horizon: Vo emphasises progressive trust because each agent persists across sessions; Cherny emphasises freedom because the agent is short-lived and goal-bound.
Resolution / synthesis
Both positions converge on substrate-runs-loop / humans-run-alignment (Substrate runs the loop; humans run alignment and taste); they diverge on whether the substrate looks like a team or a tool. The reconcilable rule:
- Heterogeneous, persistent JTBD → agents-as-team (Vo): named identities, scoped contexts, progressive trust.
- Homogeneous, ephemeral, goal-bound tasks → agents-as-tools (Cherny): minimal scaffolding, give the goal, stay out.
This is genuinely orthogonal, same operator could deploy both shapes for different problems. The contradiction reveals a missing taxonomy axis: persistence + heterogeneity of the agent's job determines which shape applies.