Entering NoMan’s Land
What happens when it’s possible to build a company without any middle management people? Teams of agents managed by agents guided by desired outcomes derived from a purpose. It’s not possible to convert an existing company to this model, but I’m seeing new startups forming in months around the ideas of a handful of people that in the past would have taken tens or hundreds of people years to build.
I’m also seeing projects take off with a single author, that would have been a company a few years ago. They are open source partly because they didn’t cost much to make so they don’t need revenue from sales as a product.
Reuven Cohen built Claude Flow and developed it into Ruflow amongst many other projects.
Steve Yegge has built Gastown and is now moving on to Gas City. https://steve-yegge.medium.com/gas-town-from-clown-show-to-v1-0-c239d9a407ec
OpenClaw and similar agentic automation systems have been started by one person and extended by their user base. I have recently been trying out https://instar.sh and contributed iMessage support to the project.
That’s for developer tooling, with no need to hire a management team to build something that deeply affects the industry.
I’m also looking at how agents can extend continuous decision intelligence by automating the collection of business metrics, deciding what to do about it, and making whatever changes are needed. When there is high certainty, without human intervention, but with guard rails and rules of engagement that direct the human domain expert to be in the loop only when needed.
The companies that operate in NoMan’s land will be created from scratch. Existing companies have too much baggage and can’t get there by firing employees. These new companies are built around a domain expert with a sense of purpose and are created by defining the outcomes they want and having the platform build it.
This isn’t a comfortable future for middle managers to contemplate, but unless your company purpose explicitly includes developing and employing people (eg consulting businesses) the people are in support of the purpose.
Will it work? I’m leaning into the future (as usual) but it doesn’t need to work for everyone to get started as a pattern, it will do the usual innovators dilemma thing of solving for simple cases and growing from there.
Edit: I’m going to add more relevant examples below as I hear about them.
https://paperclip.ing/ creates a zero human company. It was created in March 2026 and is open source with 50k stars. Here’s more background about it: https://pub.towardsai.net/paperclip-the-open-source-operating-system-for-zero-human-companies-2c16f3f22182
https://cofounder.co/ lets you run an entire company with agents.
https://savas.me/2026/06/04/the-boat-is-in-the-water-spring-voyage-is-open-source/ — a collaboration platform for humans and agents
https://jiegou.ai/ — operations layer for AI
There are more companies in this space that I’m aware of that aren’t public yet…
