Everyone Can Clean
Every company is telling their employees that they should be building agents or building with AI. While I think that's largely true, I think we're underselling what that actually means, and how different it makes everyone's job.
It's the difference between eating at a restaurant and cooking at home.
When you eat at a restaurant, you show up, you order, and you leave. What you don't see or have to deal with is everything else: sourcing the food, prepping it, timing things, cooking, and cleaning it all up. Cooking at home gives you more control and can offer better results if you know what you're doing. But the total work is genuinely and meaningfully greater, and a lot of it is work you never had to think about before (or work you didn't want to do).
Building agents is similar. Every team that starts shipping internal tools is now also a team that maintains those tools. They have to plan, they have to debug, and they have to own the entire software development lifecycle. The "it works" moment is the beginning, not the end.
When companies say everyone should be building agents, they mean it the way someone means "you should really cook more" without acknowledging the hard part is not just deciding to do it. What they're actually asking people to take on is a change in how they think about their work. Every team is now a software team.
I'm not saying this to argue against it. I think this is a real and massive opportunity. Teams that build their own tools get leverage that teams relying entirely on off-the-shelf software simply don't.
But there is a version of this that sets people up to fail, one where building agents is treated as a low-cost add-on to existing work rather than a meaningful shift and expansion of it. Where "everyone can build" gets interpreted as "and it won't cost us anything extra."
The question worth sitting with isn't whether everyone should be building. It's whether your organization has set up the kitchen — and who you think is responsible for taking care of it.
If you're thinking through how your team/org is navigating this, I'd love to hear what is/not working.