The favors we used to need — David Poblador i Garcia

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David Poblador i Garcia<br>Senior Technologist, Advisor

Founder at All Tuner Labs

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David Poblador i Garcia<br>Senior Technologist, Advisor

Founder at All Tuner Labs

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Jun 25, 2026

The favors we used to need

Work used to run on a quiet economy of small favors, and whole layers of managers grew up to keep it fair and fast. Then I shipped something I'd normally have called a friend to help with, alone, in an afternoon. No favor asked, no debt owed. When agents can do that for almost any small experiment, the roles built to smooth the favor chain don't vanish, they invert.

I ended the last post on a promise. That one was about the day I stopped doubting AI coding agents, and about how much further they let a single experienced engineer reach: things you can now build alone in an afternoon that used to take a team and a month. Then I dodged the obvious next question. If one person’s reach can expand this much, the way teams are built around that person has to change too, and this is the start of that argument. Less about me this time, more about everyone standing next to me, and about the whole apparatus we’ve spent decades building to hold groups of engineers together.

Running on favors

I’ve spent most of my career on engineering teams, and almost none of the work that mattered ever moved the way the org chart promised. It moved on favors. When I got wedged on something I didn’t understand, I’d wander over to the one person who actually knew the deploy pipeline and ask. When a teammate was about to commit to a shaky design, they’d grab me to poke holes in it before it hardened into something we’d all regret. I owed someone a code review, someone owed me an afternoon of debugging, and that web of small, unrecorded debts was how things really got built. I earned standing by helping people, I spent it when I was stuck, and that quiet tally of who had helped whom was most of what turned a roomful of engineers into a team.

Anthropic, in a piece about AI building itself, put the same idea more sharply, and named the part I’d been circling around:

Work (and life) ran on a gift economy of small favors between humans. “Can you help me get this script running?” […] each one created a little debt, a little mutual awareness. [Claude is] faster, it creates zero debt, but each of these is a lost bid for human collaboration.

Once I started seeing work this way, I couldn’t stop noticing how much of how we build teams exists to smooth that chain of favors. Team leads, product managers, project managers, engineering managers: underneath the titles, much of what these roles do is keep the favor economy fair and keep it fast. A good team lead gives people an equal footing across wildly different seniorities and temperaments. A product manager keeps the backlog legible enough that you know who to ask, and for what. A project manager arbitrates the cross-cutting priorities so the person with the least accumulated credit can still get what they need to move. The whole discipline grew up around the friction of humans needing other humans, and in the end most of it is a careful machine for managing debt.

The favor I didn’t ask Albert for

A few weeks ago Albert Horta handed me a small black circuit board. Albert is the friend I call whenever a project drifts somewhere near a soldering iron, the one whose hands I borrow the moment something stops being software and starts being hardware. The board was a LILYGO T-Call: an ESP32 microcontroller with an LTE modem bolted onto it. I wanted to turn it into a self-hosted SMS gateway, a little always-on box that talks to the cellular network directly and lets me send and receive texts from a web app, with no cloud in the middle.

This is embedded firmware work, and it is genuinely not my world. Arduino, ESP32, driving a modem over a serial line with AT commands, decoding incoming SMS in raw PDU mode where you reassemble multipart messages by hand and pull Unicode and emoji out of hex. I have never programmed one of these in my life.

In the old world, this is where the favor would have continued. Albert had given me the hardware, and for the hard part I’d have leaned on him too. I’d have explained what I wanted, we’d have...