Cook Together, Clean Together, Build Together
Ask anyone who worked at Block/Square what they loved most and I guarantee you the first thing they'll say is "its the people".
Square's mission of economic empowerment and growing by helping others grow brought together builders who lead with empathy, care about their craft, and deeply care about the person they are building for. Together we made it a great place to work and a great product.
The best teams I've worked with have always turned coworkers into real friendships. The kind of friendships that promote vulnerability and compassion. Where you can admit what you don't know and learn from each other's experiences. Teams like this reshape how you think about problems and challenge your assumptions.
Personal growth drives every high performer I know. They seek teams that ship products and challenge them to become better at their craft. Your fastest growth will be when a teammate approaches a problem in a way you never would have. Or when, with kindness, they show you a blind spot you didn't know you had. AI agents can make you more productive, but they can't push you to rethink your assumptions or stretch into unfamiliar territory the way another person can. They don't challenge your perspective and instead they reflect it back to you.
I'm starting to think about it like cooking dinner with a partner. When one person cooks it's the other person's job to do the dishes, except nobody ever fights over who gets to clean. Washing dishes isn't a skill people desire to develop, it's a necessity, a chore. Cooking is where the skill, creativity, and development lives.
My wife and I love to cook together when we have the time. We both cook and we both clean. The learning, creativity and growth is shared! She's a much better chef than me so I get to ask questions learn from her, see and do. Afterwards we clean. The load is shared and the whole thing feels less like work because of it.
Working with AI can start to feel like it does the cooking while you're left rinsing plates. The work gets done, but you miss on growth. You miss out on growing others and being mentored yourself.
A team of humans guiding AI agents will build a better product than a single person with a team of agents. I'll never be friends with an AI Agent. It will never introduce me to new lived experiences or challenge my assumptions and biases in solving problems. AI agents are a powerful tool and they can absolutely help make the software. But good teams and good companies are built by people who care.
There's an African proverb: "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." Right now, the industry obsesses with the idea that AI lets a single person do the work of ten. And while I doubt that, let's assume it can. I'd never want to be a one-person team with an army of agents. Whatever you're building would be better built by a team of humans guiding the tools together.
Team health matters. Trust matters. The feeling that someone actually has your back matters. These compound over time, and no amount of AI tooling replaces them. So use AI and use it aggressively, but don't use it as a reason to shrink your team down to just you, because in the end, its the people.
