Job titles are changing in the AI era. Maybe you’re a “builder,” or have “forward-deployed” tacked onto your role.
Claude Code creator Boris Cherny had been thinking about these changes. He wrote on X that fields like engineering, product, and design were all melting into one — and that his own team could provide a lens into “what roles might look like in the future.”
Cherny’s team has five archetypes, he wrote:
- The “Prototyper”: These workers create new ideas, “many of which don’t ship.”
- The “Builder”: These workers turn a prototype into a “production-grade product.”
- The “Sweeper”: These workers clean, simplify, and optimize performance.
- The “Grower”: These workers expand and iterate on existing products to better fit the market.
- The “Maintainer”: These workers keep an existing product “secure, reliable, fast, and efficient as it scales.”
Many Claude Code employees span multiple archetypes, Cherny wrote. A healthy team has a mix of all five archetypes, though the balance may depend on the product’s maturity and scale, he wrote.
“Maybe product roles of the future will look more like this, and less like the domain-specific roles of today?” Cherny asked.
Cherny is one of many business leaders questioning how the org chart will change with AI. Figma CEO Dylan Field said in October that job titles were merging — and that everyone was becoming a “product builder.”
Other leaders are doing away with the term “manager” in the AI era, opting for other roles like “player-coaches” and “org leads.”
Kun Chen, a Meta and Microsoft alum, commented on Cherny’s post, saying he didn’t like archetypes because they let workers pick one and then “never question themselves again.” He advised that workers stay flexible.
Cherny responded: “Totally agree. Roles often change over time/project.”
Another commenter asked whether AI could replace the “builder” and “sweeper” roles. Cherny replied that Claude’s power extended beyond those two archetypes.
“Claude can help with all of these to varying extents, and will improve over time,” he wrote.
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