The Death of the Individual Contributor

I had a moment at work today where I was kind of like “what am I even doing?” I had a few claude code sessions running as I sat there waiting for them to finish and I couldn’t help but compare this to 1) my old job at Bain and 2) work just a few years ago. Work in 2026 looks radically different than work in 2024, and it’s time we think about how to approach that.

What shocked me most just today was the sheer output I had. I made two decks, a PRD, and as I type this a data project is still chugging along on the laptop a few feet away from me. I did this on top of all the one-off requests I got from my manager. And the output isn’t bad either. I gave these tasks in-depth prompting, systems for managing its tasks, and checked all the output and went through multiple rounds of edits. The output is honestly pretty great - far better than something I could have made on my own.

The death of the individual contributor

The reality of 2026, to me, is the death of the individual contributor. Instead of just me, I have several agents at my finger tips to deploy in any way that I see fit. If I act like an individual contributor, my output will be incredibly limited and less valuable.

Joining a startup, I’ve seen how this plays out at levels far beyond what I saw in consulting. When I asked for more tokens, the CTO gladly gave me more. At Bain, I’d be asked to compute token cost before having it take on a project - seriously.

How to win

What I encourage myself to do and what I encourage others to do at this time is to take two things really seriously: 1) having ideas and figuring out which ones deserve investment and 2) using AI to execute and test all those ideas. To those who can master those two skills, the world is yours.