Jean-Michel Lemieux

Another common question I’m answering working with scaling tech companies is… Q. What’s the worst leadership advice you’ve heard? A. By far the worst is “Hire great people and get out of their way”. Let me explain… 🧵 (1/32)

@threefactor In retrospect "onboarding" was a crux for companies that didn't organize for rapid time to value.

So what you're saying is that AI allowed you to hit the road running whereas traditional devs take six months to "get up to speed" I'll take it. Especially since I was only given the first three months of their employment to figure out whether they actually knew what they were talking about...

Joined a new AI-native company this week and it’s kind of wild how different it feels already. The laptop arrived, I logged in, and an agent basically took over from there. It set up my dev env, pulled repos, fixed dependency issues, got permissions approved, pointed me at the backlog, linked the architecture docs, and surfaced the Slack debates I actually needed to read before touching production. When I needed context on something, I asked the agent and it found the exact thread from months ago explaining why a decision was made, who owned it, the related Linear issues, and the PRs connected to it. I’ve only been here 3 days but it honestly feels like I’ve worked here for a year because the usual friction and scavenger hunt for context just isn’t there anymore. We should probably stop calling this “onboarding” and rename it to “mounting” because this feels a lot more like mounting a distributed filesystem called “institutional memory” than slowly getting drip-fed context over 6 months.

@loambones @mrmarmalade11 @cryptopatrick 🎯

@mrmarmalade11 @jmwind @cryptopatrick This is a great illustration of employment mindsets. @mrmarmalade11 and @cryptopatrick think “I’m employed because I’ve made it hard for my boss to fire me.” @jmwind thinks “I’m employed because I create value.”

@buildwtim There’s a small chance that I’ll be fired next week?!

@jmwind honestly, at this rate the ai might start onboarding itself soon. hope it lets you keep the laptop ;)

@juan_allo @SilasRhyneer1 150ppl

@jmwind @SilasRhyneer1 What's the size of the company?. Wondering if this could scale to any size

not yet, it needs your plan. I have a plan for how to explore new companies and without that it would have been a DDoS of context. The plan was roughly: 1. get dev env setup, product running locally 2. watch top voice of the customer video highlights, list top used features and pain points, top support issues 3. find out top priorities this Q, dig into progress of each and company metrics 4. fix a few bugs from step 2, forces some human<>human interaction as I'll pair review agent output with steward of the area 5. find which top priority I can help ship quicker 6. work out which memes work best in said company

@jmwind at what point does onboarding just become 'watch the agent work for a day and take notes'?

@gojaxgo The best

@jmwind Nothing like being mounted on your first week on the job I say!😂🙌

@0xgilbert Imagine a perfectly fine Unix command that’s has out lasted kernel panics and code base forks been around for 40 years and cancelled by hr in 24 hours 🤣

Calling it “mounting?” HR would like a word…

@cryptopatrick The opposite, was able to work on valuable human only tasks quickly. With none of the frustration of wasting time on boring setup. More importantly, context across many areas is at your finger tips.

"I’ve only been here 3 days but it honestly feels like I’ve worked here for a year because the usual friction and scavenger hunt for context just isn’t there anymore." You make it sound like that's a good thing, when in reality it just means you're even more replaceable - doesn't it? By now, friction is what's actually keeping a lot of people employed in domains which are easy to automate.

@KuroiKumanoashi That escalated quickly!

@jmwind You're not going to believe this, but "mounting" is taken. Plus HR would like to see you tomorrow morning first thing.

@proxy_vector Spot on!

@jmwind The underrated part is first-week compression. If an agent removes env setup and permissions thrash, new hires can start building product judgment on day 1 instead of burning it on yak shaving.

@0xkron just this tweet 🐣

@jmwind What have you shipped?

@newolddlowen got a headache looking at that viz. but yes, feel like you're connecting into a brain and up to you to decide how to use it. It can be distracting, but I had a plan and it just went faster because of access to everything.

@jmwind Building something similar but for Founders specifically. When intelligence is connected it feels like the future.

@LucasLacerdaUX the laptop was the easiest part! Clone your dotfiles, terminal config and you're off to the races. Ok, well I did have to create a few PAT for Github access and all that jazz.

@jmwind love this. onboarding is often already overwhelming enough so this is a welcome upgrade tbh, setting up a new work laptop is a chore even if you're just upgrading to a new one 😅 i'll admit i've procrastinated this process a few times.

@varadh using @stillaai and @NotionHQ as the backbone. A bunch of custom agents and it's not perfect. Last company I built from day 0 and always had full context so jumping in mid-flight with these tools is blissful.

@jmwind very fun! did they build their own agent or is it a coding agent?

@alfanocg soon

@jmwind Incredible!! Which co? Big reveal en route?

@sreuter 😂

@jmwind I'm still conviced this was you mate!

Dress for the job you want. Some people peaked in varsity jackets, I peaked in grey t-shirt.

@BorisBerenberg Ill take a look 👀

@jmwind We’re trying to solve this for everybody. For anyone who wants to solve a business problem using AI and help up skill their peers at the same time.

It’s hard to explain how fun it is to build right now. There’s also an additional Shopify origin story behind why this moment feels strangely familiar to me. Early Shopify, a few people on the infra team realized something important: every time someone logged into a terminal and typed commands into production, knowledge disappeared. Nobody else saw what happened, nobody learned from it, and the second exit was called the know-how was basically gone forever. So they built a /command system in Slack that let people run Unix commands and internal infra helpers directly from chat. At first it seemed almost silly, but the effect was profound. Some people objected, « you’re just cloning what you can do in the terminal, it’s a waste of time ». But incidents became collaborative instead of isolated. Troubleshooting became searchable. New engineers could follow along in real time and see how systems were actually operated under pressure instead of reading stale docs written six months later. Slack quietly became the terminal. That experience changed how I thought about software and teams. The best builders are not just increasing leverage or automating work. They’re building systems that capture and compound learning across an organization. A lot of the magic companies develop internally usually evaporates into terminals, meetings, DMs, and people’s heads.
 Coding is becoming less single-player. Research is becoming less single-player. Even debugging, operations, and product thinking are turning into shared surfaces where humans and AI work together in public. You can literally watch ideas form, evolve, get challenged, and turn into working systems in real time.
 It feels like we’re finally building systems that make groups of people smarter together. Not just individually productive.