George Sivulka, the 27-year-old Stanford grad who founded and runs the AI enterprise startup Hebbia, has put his finger on the defining anxiety of the AI agent era: companies raced to deploy AI workforces without building any of the management infrastructure to run them.
Hebbia already serves clients including BlackRock, KKR, and the U.S. Air Force, giving Sivulka a front-row seat to how badly this is going inside real enterprises. His essay, published on a16z’s newsletter, argues that AI didn’t cut labor costs—it inverted the equation entirely: “for the first time in history, humans are cheaper than software.” And for all those CEOs who rushed headfirst into the agent era briefly known as “tokenmaxxing,” he offered a warning: “you just hired a million bad employees.”
The era ended when Amazon famously disclosed a $500 million loss in one month alone as agents ran wild to little effect, while Ford Motor Company actually hired back a new force of human engineer “graybeards” to work hand in hand with AI augmentation efforts. To Sivulka, the moment is like a mostly forgotten railroad crash in 1841 that ended one era, and began another.
The railroad crash analogy
Sivulka reached back to the 1830s and 1840s, when American railroad track mileage exploded roughly 120-fold in a decade with no coordination systems to match the growth, until a fatal train collision in Massachusetts in 1841 forced the industry to invent modern management—defined roles, reporting lines, hierarchies.
