System 1. System 2. System 3. Now Rethink the Team.

Recent research frames AI as a third cognitive system—external cognition operating alongside intuition and deliberate reasoning. That framing has implications.

• System 1 — intuition
• System 2 — deliberate reasoning
• System 3 — external cognition (AI)

System 3 changes something fundamental:

It collapses the distance from idea to working system.

What used to take 6–9 months of coordination can now be explored in days. Sometimes hours.

That changes how teams should form.

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The Constraint Shift

The old constraint was execution capacity. The new constraint is alignment and judgment.

If AI removes most technical friction, then the smartest move is not to distribute work thinner.

It is to compress alignment.

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The New Team Formation Pattern

Bring the right people together early. Face-to-face if possible.

Product. Engineering. Design. Risk. Commercial. Domain experts.

Instead of debating hypotheticals, build something tangible immediately.

Let System 3 generate options. Let humans interrogate them together.

When you do this:

• Misalignment surfaces early
• Taste becomes explicit
• Constraints become visible
• Goals become owned collectively

This is how you avoid AI-slop.

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How AI-Slop Happens

AI-slop happens when:

One person + one model + infinite iteration = plausible output with weak shared authorship.

The output looks authored. But who authored it? That ambiguity is the real problem.

Generation is cheap. Verification is not. One person iterating alone can't close that gap.

The "System 3 catch-up" feeling happens when:

The model moves fast and the organization moves slow.

But if the team compresses the first loop together, AI becomes a multiplier—not a destabilizer.

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The Opportunity

There is a massive opportunity here.

With execution friction reduced, teams can be:

• Smaller
• More cross-functional
• More synchronized at the start
• More autonomous afterward

Compress alignment. Then delegate explicitly.

AI should not replace team formation. It should make powerful teams possible in ways that were previously too expensive.

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The Loop Has Changed

System 3 changes the loop.

Now we need to redesign the human layer around it.

The organizations that figure this out—that compress alignment, surface misalignment early, and let AI accelerate shared understanding rather than individual output—will move faster than their competitors.

Not because they have better models. Because they have better team architecture.

The cognitive shift is real. But the organizational shift is where the advantage lives.