Rule. Do not propose delegating work to a partner, contractor, or hire unless the person is sophisticated enough to handle the work that AI has NOT already subsumed.
Why: Rich’s insight Sunday 19 April 2026: “AI makes it more difficult to delegate: because the work that gets delegated, is now of a higher level i.e. needs more sophisticated people to hand it to.” The work Rich used to delegate is now done by Rich+Claude directly. What remains to be delegated is the residual — strategic conversations, sophisticated judgement calls, senior technical decisions. Average-skill partners cannot do this work; delegating to them wastes Rich’s review cycles + produces lower-quality output than Rich+Claude would have produced alone.
How to apply:
- When suggesting partners, contractors, or hires, first ask: is this person sophisticated enough to do the work AI can’t?
- Reject “Nova-style mid-tier developer” proposals for work that AI now handles.
- Favour fewer, more senior collaborators over more, less senior ones.
- For bootstrap + Rich+Claude-primary architectures, prefer “no delegation” to “wrong-person delegation”.
- Partnerships that ARE worth keeping: those where the partner brings something AI + Rich can’t produce (domain authority, distribution channel, client relationships, institutional legitimacy, specialist legal drafting). Partnerships that are NOT worth keeping: those where the partner is doing commoditised implementation work that Rich+Claude does better.