Open Source, Co-Ops and a History of Bias in Corporate America

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Open Source, Co-Ops and a History of Bias in Corporate America Why the historical classist and racist organization structure from the military to corporate America needs to change in the AI area

Radical Therapist 1 Jun 04, 2026

At Buildly, we do not believe the future of work should be a smaller group of executives commanding a larger system of people and machines. We have seen what AI can do not just to software product quality without guardrails, but to the junior and midlevel team members who are laid off or never hired at all in exchange for better profit rates with AI tokens vs human salaries. That is just the old hierarchy with better software. The history of work has always had this tension. You can go back as far as possible in US history and look at the military, commissioned officers were trained and trusted to command while enlisted service members carried out the work and risk. In the corporate and business world, executives and managers became the people who planned, measured, and optimized, while workers became the people being measured. Those structures were not only about race, but in America they were built inside a society already shaped by racism, classism, unequal education, unequal access to capital, and unequal access to leadership. AI now forces us to confront that history again. If we are not careful, AI will not flatten organizations. It will make the hierarchy invisible. Instead of a manager with a clipboard, we will have an algorithm. Instead of a foreman with a stopwatch, we will have dashboards, productivity scores, automated performance reviews, and AI systems that decide who gets opportunity and who gets replaced. That is not progress. The goal should not be to replace people with AI. The goal should be to replace bureaucracy, repetitive work, bad process, and unnecessary gatekeeping. Buildly’s view is simple: AI should remove drudgery, not dignity. Automation should increase agency, not surveillance. Productivity gains should be shared, not extracted. Hierarchy should be functional, temporary, and accountable — not a measure of human worth.

This is why we talk about AI-native product development differently. An AI-native company does not need to be a traditional corporate pyramid. It can be a small, capable, transparent team where humans own the mission, AI agents assist the workflow, customers participate in feedback, and decision-making is tied to responsibility instead of status. We do not need fake flatness. Flat organizations often hide power instead of removing it. What we need is flat dignity and structured responsibility . That means clear roles, but not class status. Leadership , but not domination. Automation , but not disposability. AI agents, but not invisible bosses. Metrics , but not dehumanizing surveillance. Speed , but not extraction. The next generation of startups has a choice. We can use AI to build companies where a few people own everything and everyone else competes with machines. Or we can use AI to build companies where more people can participate, learn, create, and share in the value they help generate. Buildly and our CollabHub exists for the second path. A cooperative work environment of equals with distinct roles and responsibilities.

The Buildly AI Work Manifesto The old model of work separated people into those who decide and those who execute. The military had officers and enlisted service members. Corporations had executives and workers. Factories had managers and laborers. Tech had founders, managers, developers, support teams, and users separated into layers of authority. AI could make that worse. It could create a world where owners and executives use AI to monitor, replace, and control everyone else. But it does not have to. We believe AI should help small teams do meaningful work without recreating the worst parts of corporate hierarchy. We believe automation should remove repetitive tasks, not human agency. We believe junior people still need apprenticeship, not exclusion. We believe customers should be part of the product loop, not treated as tickets. We believe developers are becoming part AI manager, part QA, part product thinker, and part advocate for the user. We believe the future is not flat chaos. It is flat dignity, structured responsibility . That is the Buildly path: human-centered, AI-native, transparent, collaborative, and built for people who want to create without being absorbed into the old machine.

The future of work should not be a more efficient version of the past. It should be a correction. AI gives us the chance to remove the bureaucracy, surveillance, and class assumptions built into older institutions — but only if we design organizations where people remain more important than the systems that support them.

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Open Source, Co-Ops and a History of Bias in Corporate America

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