Swarm riders: a new class of agent commanders spending 1000x more tokens than median engineers
JensHonack · x · 2026-11-11
Matt Huang coins "swarm riders" — a new class of people who consistently command large swarms of AI agents productively, calling it a new managerial skill that's more technical than managing human orgs.
- Based on riders at Tempo and Paradigm, their productive token spend is 1000x-10000x higher than median software engineers, and 100x higher than top 5% Claude Code users
- Even among highly AI-native people, AI use follows a power-law distribution
- The craft resembles ML more than software engineering: grappling with black-box systems, defining reward functions and evals, transmuting non-verifiable problems into verifiable ones
Related event: 'Swarm Riders': Orchestrating Massive Agent Fleets Becomes a New Skill(2 posts)→
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