Tim Huckle

Jack Dorsey just said the quiet part out loud. "Middle management exists because humans were the only option for information routing. They aren't anymore." I'm running a small team right now. We just hit the point where I can't keep everything in my head anymore. I know this problem intimately. A human can manage 3-8 people effectively. That's it. I'm at that edge right now. The moment you cross it, you need another layer. Another person to route information. Another meeting to align. Another delay. The Roman Army invented hierarchical management 2000 years ago. 8 soldiers → 80 men → 480 → 5,000. Every company still uses this structure today. I assumed this was just how it works. Jack Dorsey just published why that's about to end. The Constraint I'm Living Right Now We're at the inflection point. Small enough that I can still talk to everyone directly. Big enough that I'm becoming the bottleneck. Every decision waits for me to route context between people. I've been watching AI tools for 2 years. Claude, ChatGPT, every new model. I thought the answer was copilots. Give everyone AI assistants to work faster within the existing structure. Block just published something that made me realize I was thinking too small. What Block Is Actually Building They're not giving everyone copilots. They're replacing what the hierarchy does with a "world model." Two parts: Company World Model: How Block understands its own operations. This replaces me. The information I carry in my head, the context I relay between people, the decisions I route. The world model does that. Customer World Model: Block sees both sides of millions of transactions through Cash App and Square. Money is the most honest signal. People lie on surveys, but transactions are facts. That understanding compounds every second. Here's what got me: When Block's intelligence layer tries to compose a solution and can't because a capability doesn't exist, that failure becomes the roadmap. Customer reality generates the backlog directly. No product manager hypothesizing. No guessing what to build next. The system observes what customers actually need. Block normalizes to three roles: - ICs: Build capabilities, models, interfaces. The world model provides the context I currently provide. They don't wait for me to tell them what to do. - DRIs: Own specific problems for 90 days. Full authority to pull resources from any team. Then rotate to new problems. - Player-Coaches: Still build. Still code. Develop people. But don't spend days in alignment meetings because the world model handles that. No permanent middle management layer. Why This Matters to Me I'm at the exact moment where most companies add a layer. Hire someone to manage the growing team while I focus on strategy. Standard playbook. But that just delays the problem. When we hit 30 people, we need another layer. Then another at 100. Each layer slows us down. Block is saying: what if you don't add layers at all? What if the AI becomes the coordination layer? I don't know if Block's execution will work. This could break spectacularly. But the question is too important to ignore. Dorsey asks: "What does your company understand that is genuinely hard to understand, and is that understanding getting deeper every day?" If the answer is nothing, AI is just cost optimization. Cut headcount, improve margins, get absorbed. If the answer is deep, AI reveals what your company actually is. The Uncomfortable Truth I'm Sitting With For 2,000 years, we had no alternative to hierarchy. The question was never whether you needed layers. The question was whether humans were the only option for what those layers do. They aren't anymore. I'm watching this closely. Not because I have answers. Because I'm living the exact problem Block is trying to solve. And if they figure it out, it changes everything. Follow @heyshrutimishra for more on AI reshaping how companies actually work. I'm figuring this out in real time.