Context is the new process - by Michael Mayernick

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Context is the new process<br>Most process exists to move context between people. That job is starting to disappear into the context itself.

Michael Mayernick<br>Jul 30, 2026

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Linear spent years building the issue tracker most product teams regard as a standard for what good software looks like. This year, they began dismantling that product and reimagining the whole question around context. In so doing, they said, more or less in these words, that issue tracking is dead. A best-in-class product uninventing itself is worth confronting. This isn’t a rebranding exercise. Issue tracking is, at its core, a coordination problem, and I think they noticed something radical changing about coordination.<br>A ticket is a container for just enough context that someone else can act without having been in the room.

Most of what we call process, the tickets and standups and status fields and handoff rituals, exists to move context between people. A ticket is a container for just enough context that someone else can act without having been in the room. A standup is a daily context sync. A PRD is context translated for engineers, a brief is the same context translated again for marketing. We built all this machinery because context was expensive to share, and the machinery was how a company kept twelve people pointed at the same thing without every one of them holding the whole picture.<br>Thanks for reading Inside AI Native! Subscribe for free to receive new posts.

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Agents change the economics underneath that. An agent doesn’t need the work chopped into tickets and routed through a board, it needs to know what you’re trying to do, what’s already been decided, and what good looks like, and it can hold far more of that at once than any process artifact was designed to carry. So as agents absorb the mechanics of the work, the steps stop being the thing you manage and the shared understanding becomes the thing you manage, and coordination starts to look less like a sequence of handoffs and more like a body of context that everyone, human and agent, works from.<br>When the context is good, the work coordinates itself.

We’ve been running BotBot this way for a while now, with the strategy, the voice, the decisions, and the reasoning behind them written down in one place that agents read the same way a new teammate would. And the surprise is that the process artifacts I assumed we’d eventually need mostly never showed up. When the context is good, the work coordinates itself far more than I expected, because the thing the ticket was carrying is already available to whoever, or whatever, picks up the work. The few times things have gone sideways, the cause was almost never a missing process step but a piece of context that was stale or missing or never written down.<br>And in the last two weeks this stopped being a product-team story, because the field started saying it out loud. Jack Dorsey launched Buzz, a workspace where AI agents are members with their own identity, and in his follow-up essay named the problem it actually solves in one word: context. Every seam between tools loses information, he wrote, and agents feel it the most, because they can’t help with what they can’t see. Chroma’s CEO published “12-factor companies” the same week with the line I’d have led with if I’d written it first: “The old firm bundled labor and coordination. The new firm bundles context and authority.”

And an essay making the rounds told the cautionary version. An engineer left a well-built agent loop running overnight, planner, builder, reviewer, every checkpoint passing, and woke up to thirty thousand lines of code for a modest problem, because nothing in the loop owned whether the work still served the goal. The process held all night. The context failed.<br>Linear noticed it for product teams, and engineering was just the first place the economics flipped. Dorsey’s cure is one shared room where nothing gets lost, and I understand the instinct, but seeing everything and knowing what’s true are different problems.<br>It’s no longer which ceremonies to hold or which tool to track the work in, it’s what keeps the context good.

If context is replacing process as the coordination layer, then the question that starts to matter is a different one than the ones we’re used to asking about how teams run. It’s no longer which ceremonies to hold or which tool to track the work in, it’s what keeps the context good. Current, true, actually reflective of what the company believes. That’s a different kind of work than running a process, and I think it’s quickly becoming some of the most important work being done.<br>Thanks for reading Inside AI Native! Subscribe for free to receive new posts.

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