The shape of
a company changes.

Every company runs on a medium. In 1990 the medium was paper. In 2005 it was email. In 2015 it was Slack. The medium isn’t neutral — it shapes which decisions get made, by whom, on what cadence.

For the last five years the medium has been a slow drift toward intent: documents that drafted themselves, threads that summarised themselves, calendars that held themselves up. We didn’t notice the shift happen because each step looked like a productivity feature.

(a) The middle layer of a company gets thinner. Most middle-management work is the translation of intent into trail — turning a CEO’s sentence into a project plan. When the intent layer reads literately enough, that translation gets shorter.

(b) Writing gets more important. If your company runs on intent, the quality of how you state your intents is the quality of the company. The best operators we know now are people who can say one declarative sentence that resolves a week of disagreement.

(c) Decisions per hour rise. Not because people are working harder, but because the cycle time between intent and action is shorter. The trick is to make sure the decisions don’t outpace judgement.

A few things, none of them clean. Most of our internal docs are written as intent statements followed by a bulleted disagreement section. Our PRs include a "what would change my mind" paragraph. Our meetings are shorter — because the model has read the doc — but the meetings we *do* have are denser.

None of this is invention. Some of it is what the best small teams have always done. The novelty is that the medium is now intent, not paper, and a model can read along.

The obvious risk of running a company on intent is that intent compresses thinking. A short declarative sentence can express a clear position; it can also express a half-formed one and hide the fact. The discipline is to pair the sentence with a read-back: what the model heard, what it’s about to do, where the disagreement could land.

The same discipline that makes the *product* honest makes the *company* honest. We didn’t expect the symmetry. It seems to be there.