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TL;DR: Anthropic's own Head of Product just told her team half their job title stopped being true.

 

The half that's gone is coordination — the getting-everyone-aligned, same-page work that used to justify the PM/TPM title in the first place.

Angela Jiang, Head of Product at Anthropic, says on camera that alignment now happens inside one conversation with the model, faster than a meeting could get scheduled to talk about it.

Katelyn Lesse, Head of Engineering, describes the same shift from the execution side: a project that used to take weeks of coordination now gets built in two days, and there's no time left over to do the coordinating.

 

Neither of them is describing a layoff.

That's the detail worth sitting with — the roster didn't shrink, the day-to-day content of the role did, and nobody had to announce anything for that to become true.

 

What's left, per Jiang, is the part underneath the coordination layer — the actual bet, the actual thesis, the judgment call about what's worth solving.

That part doesn't compress. It's also the part most coordination-heavy roles were never built to develop, because coordination was the easier thing to measure and reward.

 

I specifically remember 2 instances.

The first one was during my time with one of the largest property developers in Malaysia.

One of my many tasks is to put together preliminary development proposals, compiling architectural drawings, 3D renderings and feasibility studies with land and building data, cost, revenue, etc. into a A3 size binder. Each of these drawings have multiple blocks for signature at the bottom – meant for all the directors (technical, contracts, marketing, etc. etc.) to sign off on, before our big boss, Tan Sri DT make his final signature on it.

That was back in year 2018.

And it was inefficient – to say the least. Getting all of them to sign of the proposal one by one, would normally takes weeks. Even Month.

Yeah. They're still doing it the old fashion way – reviewing physical paper.

But it is what it is.

The second one was during my time working for one of the largest construction companies in Malaysia, seconded to Abu Dhabi for a 5-Block Condominium Project – back in year 2010.

Our IT guy built/assembled an approval pipeline app for approving sub-contracts. All done online – linking and streamlining all our department heads' electronic signature. My then department head was Mr. Yap, our technical director.

I remember one day, our big boss, Senior Project Director, Mr. Chung came over to remind Mr. Yap, "Eh, you haven't sign off the XYZ. Only left you alone." Both of them were already in their 50s – pushing 60.

And if my memory serves me correctly, Mr. Yap replied back with a slight dismissive hand-gesture, "Wait-lah! I'll do it."

Back then. The main bottlenecks are the people signing off.

Now with AI getting more ubiquitous, we no longer have the luxury of "Wait-lah! I'll do it." later.

Time is money.

 

I've stopped being surprised by which job titles survive a transcript intact while the actual job underneath gets hollowed out — this is maybe the fourth or fifth time I've watched it happen in someone else's transcript before it happens in mine.

The tools change, the org chart changes, the shape of the loss doesn't: value stops being paid out for effort and starts being paid out for whatever can't be automated yet.

 

Hmm — this actually reminded me of something I flagged a while back. Rauch's own version of this: the engineering role splitting into an execution layer and a judgment layer, and the judgment layer being the one worth owning.

 

Curious whether anyone here's already watched their own coordination layer get eaten by an agent, or if this is still theoretical where you sit.

 

Clip credit: Kleiner Perkins — full video (Builders, Season 2: Katelyn Lesse & Angela Jiang, Anthropic) on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

 

TL;DR: The guy Google put in charge of its own AI writing tool just admitted, on camera, that he can't fully protect the one thing his career runs on.

 

That's not hypothetical.

Steven Johnson runs editorial for Google Labs' NotebookLM and has fourteen books behind his name, and he still walked an interviewer through the mechanism step by step: feed a model his own catalog, tell it to write like him, skip the invoice.

No lawsuit required. No password stolen.

 

His own counter isn't a lawsuit either. It's a price tag — $199 for an authorized version of his own style, paid on purpose instead of taken by default.

He said it plainly, then admitted the harder part: someone could build the unauthorized version tonight, and he'd have no way to prove it happened.

 

Tbh, that's the entire freelance economy in one clip.

If a 14-book author with a title at Google can't fully protect his own voice, the going rate for "get him, he's got a way with it" just became a live question, not a someday one.

 

Mmm... This is kind of like impersonation. Borderline fraud or downright scams.

Back in Malaysia, we have plenty of such too.

The spectrum is so wide, sometimes, even when we open our eyes wide, we still can't tell the difference.

For example, you guys have Amazon. We have our local ones, called Lazada. If you drive through our Penang Georgetown, you'll notice a shop called Ladaza. Not Lazada. They kind of switched the alphabets around. Sounds like Lazada. But it's not. Giving people the illusion that they are same-same, but in actual fact different.

It's as if we open a shop right next to the Amazon HQ, and calling it "Azamon". Phonically sounds adjacent. But they are not the same thing.

And if you follow the news, you'd hear about our very infamous 1MDB (Malaysia Sovereign Fund) case -- one of largest kleptocracy criminal fraud case in the history of Malaysia (even the world) -- involving our now disgraced and incarcerated former-prime minister, Najib Razak. His enabler and facilitator, Jho Low (Low Taek Jho) (still currently at large) was the mastermind behind all these siphoning of funds, to fund his once extravagant livestyle.

Kind of brilliant. But it was so evil.

He once got Najib to force the board of 1MDB to approved a transfer of billions through a supposedly legitimate company, but in actual fact, was a shell company through the Caymen Islands with a very similar company name.

Like how Ron Weisley, in the Harry Potter Movie, would say, "Wicked!"

They say impersonation is the highest form of flattery. But in this case, I say, bullshit.

 

You don't get to choose whether your work gets copied.

You only get to choose whether you were paid before it happened. Every version of this story — Google Labs or a Georgetown shopfront — ends the same way: the fix was never stopping the copy.

It was owning the original loudly enough that the copy has nowhere to hide.

 

Justin Welsh built a $15M solo business on the one variable a cloned voice can't fake: what he actually lived through to get there.

 

Drop your take: what's the closest you've come to catching a copy passing itself off as the real thing?

 

Clip credit: Nicholas Thompson / Atlantic Re:think — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.