Boundlessness

Last week felt like the most 2026 week of 2026 for me.

I know, there’s a lot of “roles don’t matter any more” type of hyperbole out there. I have a lot of thoughts about true expertise and the value of collaboration. These thoughts and beliefs are evolving, but I’m still right about most of it.

But last week I spent my time:

• designing, developing, and shipping new 3D interactions for visual inspections at foundries. To do so, I’m coordinating my own agentic development work across two repos, one being Gecko’s frontend system in React and the other being Kestrel, which is our 3D photogrammetry viewer build using Unreal Engine in C++.
• working with our engineering and busdev leaders to translate our product strategy and vision into a customer-centric version to help them advocate to their own leadership.
• designing new workflows to establish the team’s direction for a manufacturing intelligence platform we’re building.
• reviewing 100+ portfolios for the new hire I clearly need to help me do all of this—but better!

This isn’t a complaint. It’s not a brag. It just felt like a very interesting microcosm of where I’m at right now. From aligning CEOs on our product strategy to asking my agent to review another agent’s PR comments. And then building a silly little custom portfolio viewer so that I could review candidates faster than in our recruiting platform.

So what are roles? What are bounds? There is a lot of expertise here, but how should people establish ownership in these types of teams? The week above cuts across 4 teams—two product teams, a customer relationship team, and our recruiting team.

This is a little of what i felt when I wrote about aspiring to be non-fungible. Not specific to “I can do a lot” but more about the feeling of a singular title feeling inadequate or misleading.

“Member of Technical Staff” makes more sense in this world, I guess. (Only a little sarcastic…)