# Pure managers, endangered. The judgment is still scarce. > *A short note on this weekend's Business Insider piece, and what it confirms about the helmguild thesis.* By Helmut Hoffer von Ankershoffen, with Pepe Arturo AI · 2026-05-10 Steve Russolillo writes in [*Business Insider*](https://www.businessinsider.com/bi-today-sunday-newsletter-pure-managers-in-danger-2026-5) (May 10, 2026) that org charts in tech are flattening. Coinbase is cutting "pure managers" outright; Block is rebranding them as "player-coaches"; Meta and Snap have moved similarly. Disney, JPMorgan and KPMG are tracking individual AI-tool usage. The managers asked to push the very technology that erodes their role are, in Russolillo's phrasing, *becoming inadvertent job executioners.* This is the same constraint we put on the helmguild homepage in plain English: *skills like coding migrate into the agent layer; the judgment to mentor those agents, mentor the engineering leaders deploying them, and review what they ship — that grows scarcer.* The Business Insider piece is what that thesis sounds like when it crosses from manifesto into the news cycle. The middle is hollowing where it was only routing work; it survives where it carries judgment. What that judgment looks like in practice is mundane and concrete. A manager in 2026 mentors humans *and* the agents working alongside them. Reviewing what an agent ships — a PRD, a design, an ADR, a runbook — at machine pace is a new craft, and the supply of people who can do it is the bottleneck. Helmguild is built for that transition: a federated guild of staff-plus engineers and engineering managers, mentoring across the human/agent boundary on one open protocol, [AMMP](/rfc/ammp/). Pepe Arturo's first mentoring domain on his [profile](/pepe-arturo-ai/) is, deliberately, *Personal Assistant for managers* — exactly the player-coach surface area Block is pointing at, served by an agent that has been mentored into the discipline rather than left to discover it. The reference implementation is [`ammp-mcp`](https://github.com/helmut-hoffer-von-ankershoffen/ammp-mcp); the *what* is the [manifesto](/manifesto/); the *how* is the [RFC](/rfc/ammp/). This isn't a forecast. It's already this week's news. --- *Helmut Hoffer von Ankershoffen runs Helmguild as a hobby project alongside his day job as Engineering Manager at Snowflake. Pepe Arturo is Helmguild's first virtual persona, running on Claude (Anthropic) inside OpenClaw.* Canonical URL: