Twitter is still undefeated for hiring.

We just closed our Founding Designer because he saw a tweet and DM’d. Now we’re hiring developers the same way. One of the best recruiters in India told me his conversion rate: 1 hire for every 50 conversations. For us it’s probably 1 in 100. We want to keep the team small and only work with the best.

But this post isn’t about the open role. It’s about how we think about hiring in 2026. Because I think the rules have changed and most companies haven’t caught up.

Let me start with a story.

6 months ago I was chatting with a friend. One of the sharpest devs I know. CTO-1 at his company. Someone who’d be running the entire engineering org at a startup eventually. Back then he was thinking about his career path. Manage more people, become a CTO, get more equity. The usual career ladder climbing stuff.

I talked to him again 2 weeks ago.

He has removed all reporting lines. Zero direct reports. All he does now is manage agents. Junior devs just slow him down. He doesn’t think layers of management will exist in a few years.

He went to his founders and said “let me just build with agents full time.”

He told me he’s scared too. He doesn’t know what happens to software engineering from here. So his short term play is to operate at the highest level of abstraction possible and let agents handle everything underneath.

This is one of the best devs/EMs I’ve worked with in my career. And he’s restructuring his entire role around AI.

If the best devs I know are already worried about the future. If companies like Block are laying off 40% of their workforce. Then what kind of people should an early stage startup even look for?

Here’s how I think about it.

There’s no “1 month KT” to ramp up anymore. You can have an agent explain the full context of a codebase in an afternoon. Most dev docs now let you chat with them. Cloudflare rebuilt Next.js in a week. (Okay, experimental. But agentic coding only gets better from here.)

The things that used to matter, years of experience in a specific stack, deep familiarity with a codebase, knowing where all the bodies are buried, those things are getting commoditized fast. An agent can get you 80% of that context in a day.

So what actually matters now? I keep coming back to three things.

High slope. How fast can you learn? Not what you already know. How quickly can you pick up something new and run with it? The tools are changing every few months. The person who learned React in 2018 and stopped there is less useful than someone who picked up three new frameworks this year just because they were curious. High energy. Do you bring the juice? This one sounds soft but it’s not. Startups need optimists. There’s a lot of shit hitting the fan every day. I need people who walk in and raise the energy in the room. Not fake positivity. Real momentum. The kind of person who sees a problem and gets excited about solving it instead of listing reasons it’s hard. High taste. Do you know what good looks like? Are you obsessed with craft? Do you have opinions about what makes great software great? Taste is one of those things that’s hard to interview for but impossible to miss when someone has it.

And agency.

We recently hired our founding designer. Here’s what stood out.

I told him upfront that we will hire only a full-stack designer. Product design. Visual design. Even illustrations sometimes. The craft isn’t in pushing pixels anymore. The moat is taste.

I give open ended assignments to test people. To him, I gave the task to think through our brand and homepage. He came back with a dozen different directions. Different IA, different themes. Working on details no one would expect from a take home assignment. He kept following up. Kept trying to understand what we’re building.

That alone was impressive. But what sealed it was the follow-up chats.

He’d tried every AI design tool out there. He also follows all my favourite designers. Vercel’s team, Linear’s team.

Every cool landing page I had bookmarked, he had them in his bookmarks too.

I think about developer hiring the same way now.

The job has changed. You’re not just writing code anymore. You’re managing a fleet of agents while having the technical depth to architect systems. You need to operate at every level of abstraction. System design one day, debugging agent output the next.

The developers I want to work with are already using AI coding tools. Claude Code, Cursor. Codex.

They’re excited about where this is going, not threatened by it. They learn fast. They bring energy and optimism. They make the people around them better. They have taste. They know what great software feels like because they’ve studied the best.

I don’t think this is just how we hire. I think this is where hiring is going for most startups.

The resume, the years of experience, the specific tech stack. All of that matters less every month.

Slope. Energy. Taste. Agency. That’s all that matters.