AI Killed the Maker/Manager Schedule

Yesterday I said the maker/manager schedule is dead. Today I'll tell you what killed it.

Brooks' Law used to be gospel: "Adding manpower to a late project makes it later." The math was simple. More people = more coordination overhead = slower progress.

That law just got repealed by AI.

I'm watching solo builders ship what Fortune 500 teams can't. Not because they're smarter. Because they eliminated the coordination tax entirely. One person with AI collaborators moves faster than 50 people in meetings.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: We built entire industries around coordination overhead. Project managers managing managers. Scrum masters mastering scrums. Status updates about status updates.

What happens when that overhead approaches zero?

The old African proverb said "go alone to go fast, go together to go far." AI broke that binary. Now you can go fast AND far with a team of one. The coordination happens in context windows, not conference rooms.

But let's be honest about what we're losing.

Where do junior developers learn when there's no senior team? The apprenticeship model worked for centuries. Now we're asking people to learn from machines. That's not mentorship—that's documentation with better search.

The water cooler innovations? Gone. The accidental breakthroughs from misunderstood Slack messages? Extinct. When you're orchestrating AI agents instead of collaborating with humans, serendipity requires scheduling.

And accountability? When your only reviewer is Claude, who tells you the hard truths?

Here's what financial services needs to understand: This isn't a productivity hack. It's a complete reorganization of how work happens.

I see three futures emerging:

First, the solo builders. One person, infinite AI leverage. They'll build billion-dollar companies from coffee shops. The tax code isn't ready. The regulators aren't ready. But they're already building.

Second, the traditionalists. They'll keep their 50-person teams and wonder why they're getting lapped by teenagers with API keys. They'll optimize their sprint planning while the world sprints past them.

Third—and this is where it gets interesting—federated collaboration.

Think Unix philosophy applied to organizations. Small sovereign domains with clear owners. One person owns the entire API. Another owns all customer operations. Not tasks—territories. Each domain is a black box with one human directing AI inside.

The coordination happens through the work, not meetings about the work. GitHub becomes your watercooler. Shipped code becomes your status update.

This preserves what matters: human judgment, peer accountability, shared purpose. But eliminates what doesn't: coordination overhead, approval chains, alignment theater.

We're not choosing between efficiency and humanity. We're architecting systems that preserve both.

The infrastructure exists today. The mental models are still catching up.

Stop asking how many people you need. Start asking what territories need owners.

The future isn't solo isolation or team coordination. It's sovereign builders whose work interlocks like Lego blocks.

Build accordingly.