What Block Gets Right and Wrong About AI-Driven Organizations
Block recently published an essay arguing that AI will replace organizational hierarchy — that the span-of-control constraint governing every large organization since the Roman legions can finally be broken. The essay, introduced with an endorsement from Sequoia, spends considerable time on military history before arriving at Block's vision: a company organized as "an intelligence" rather than a hierarchy, where AI maintains a "world model" of operations and coordinates work that previously required layers of human management.
The piece is ambitious. It is also roughly 80% historical context, 15% vision, and 5% acknowledgment that none of this exists yet. Let's extract what's actually useful.