AI won’t solve Work Theater – roady's rants

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AI won’t solve Work Theater

August 16, 2026

What is work theater?

It’s the idea that at large companies the incentive to deliver something real to the customer becomes a small fraction of work, and is subsumed by things that internally seem like bigger or more substantial projects to management but often aren’t. Here’s a pretty good take on it.

Building more was never the answer

One of the biggest lies of work theater is “keep your head down, don’t ask questions, especially don’t challenge the direction, and if we aren’t succeeding just buckle down.”

This advice, which boils down to "Think less, act more" is good advice when you know exactly what to build. The challenge is that even when you think you know exactly what to build, you never know what unknown-unknowns may be at play. When you don’t know exactly what to build do the opposite : slow down, ask more questions, and solicit input from a wider range of people.

The AI era promises a much faster 0->1 transition (when you know what to build). But it does nothing to help with where to strategically go from there (when you don’t know where your next 10x comes from). In fact, it makes it exponentially easier to play out the theatrics of progress (look at all this motion! So many tickets! So many changes!) while treading water quarter after quarter.

When I look at big companies that fail (yahoo et al), the failure is almost never because they couldn’t build fast enough. It’s that they didn’t know where to focus. Thus, I don’t see AI fundamentally helping large companies.

Layers Of Management

In Recursive Middle Manager Hell Raemon proposes the primary factor of company waste is middle-management-layers. I’ve worked at a dozen tech companies, and this squares pretty well with what I’ve seen – it’s not the only factor that matters but it’s one of the biggest.

The anti-pattern of building-the-wrong-thing doesn’t get solved by a 2x or 3x speed-up. Thus my prediction (and experience) is that companies with more than 4 levels of managers (including executives) are going to see small or negative improvement from agentic work. The reason I could foresee negative is that AI expands the capacity of the most optics-driven career-oriented engineer to create drag on everybody around them (tech debt).

Conversely I think that companies with three levels of management or less will see significant acceleration, as fewer people can get more done. They will be able to achieve 0->1 more quickly, and build out numerous integrations and basic features.

Ultimately

This is probably a good thing. Competition forces a superior user experience, and large lazy incumbent companies (be it Yahoo in 2010 or Meta in 2026) should raise the bar on what they deliver or be replaced.