Nick

Swarm riders and Swarm-native companies AI-use even among highly AI-native people is power-law distributed. There seems to be a new class of people — call them “swarm riders” — who are capable of consistently commanding large swarms of agents to productive ends. This is a new kind of managerial skill, analogous to the skill it takes to manage large organizations of people, but wholly different in nature and of course more technical. Based on the swarm riders we know (including many at @Tempo and @Paradigm), these people are capable of productive token spend that is 1000x-10000x higher than median software engineers, and 100x higher than top 5% Claude Code users. The art of swarm riding is different from software engineering and more akin to machine learning, where practitioners grapple with black box systems: defining reward functions and evals, transmuting non-verifiable problems into verifiable problems, running experiments, etc. Swarm-native companies are a new class of company founded by and populated by swarm riders. These companies are organized around swarms in a way that conventional companies will struggle to replicate, as the cost of internal human coordination is sand in the gears of an effective swarm. Effective swarm-native companies will define the right reward functions and evals, remove functional and bureaucratic barriers, and then let the swarms cook. We’ve gotten to see a few swarm-native companies up close — reshaping financial rails @Tempo, building a new gaming platform @Spawn, cyber swarms at Cathedral Systems — and it’s clear these teams wield a significant advantage over pre-AI teams. Some questions I’ve been wondering about: 1) How fast will swarm riding diffuse through the economy? The implications for token spend could be significant. 2) Can swarms be effectively adopted by existing companies or will it generally track the formation of new swarm-native companies? 3) What becomes scarce as swarm capabilities themselves commoditize (through frontier models becoming better at swarming, swarm capabilities built into harnesses, etc)? Cultures and teams that can define reward functions well and otherwise get out of the way?