Executive Briefing: You Bought Better Tools and Your Finished Work Still Waits

AI newsletter writer Nate B. Jones argues that one person's speed with AI agents can outrun a team's review and decisions, and names six principles for raising team output.

AI agents can make one person on a team far more productive while the team as a whole stays behind. Nate B. Jones, who writes an AI newsletter, says managers often make the fast person teach everyone, which can use up that person's new capacity. He names six principles for raising the whole team's output without slowing down its fastest people.

• Jones calls one person producing ten times the work for five colleagues to sort through a capacity problem, and says that slowing that person down only hides it.
• Jones cites a report from the AI coding tool Cursor: a user at the 99th percentile merged about fifteen times as many code changes as the median active contributor. He warns that this does not show fifteen times the value to customers, or that AI caused the whole difference.
• Jones's six principles include making agent work usable by more than one person and leaving work in a state that someone else can continue. He warns that, done carelessly, all six can turn into needless bureaucracy.
• Jones says a tenfold gain in implementation becomes a gain of 1.8 times for the business, but the arithmetic is for paying subscribers. This account covers only the part of the briefing open to all readers.

A team with one very fast AI user can first find where finished work waits, in review or in decisions, before asking that person to teach others. This follows Jones's argument in the free part of a paywalled briefing, and the paid part was not read.

Derived by Working Surface from the article. Source line: Leave work in a state somebody can continue.

29 September 2026: when AI tools do the making, a team has to keep some of the old steps on purpose.