Why I still need a team, and why I want a team of architects
- Ajit Gupta
- Jul 6
- 3 min read
At Midships we have made a conscious decision to cap the team at forty. Not forty people, forty excellent engineers. Every seat matters and every seat has been earned. In a year when most of my peers are talking about how many people AI lets them remove, I want to explain why we are doing something that looks, on the surface, like the opposite.
It started with nostalgia. I was thinking back to the architecture courses I was sent on early in my career, the ones that genuinely shaped how I think, and I decided the team deserved the same. So I sat down to build our own. A proper internal course on architecture principles, architect behaviours and the considerations every system has to balance. I expected it to take a few evenings. It took rather longer, because as I wrote it something kept surfacing that I had not gone looking for.
I realised I was describing the one thing agentic AI cannot do.
Let me be precise. AI is a superb instrument for the parts of architecture that have a right answer. It is genuinely good at generating options, at pressure testing a design, at helping refine a solution you already broadly understand. I use it for exactly this, every day, and it makes the work better. Anyone telling you it has no place in serious engineering is not actually using it, or not using it well.
But architecture is not the calculable part. Architecture is judgement under conflict. The principles contradict each other. Security pulls against performance. Simplicity pulls against flexibility. Reliability pulls against cost. There is almost never a correct answer, only a defensible one, and choosing which good thing to sacrifice for which other good thing is not a calculation. It is a judgement about what this particular client should want, made by someone who understands their business, their constraints and their politics, and who will stand behind the decision when it is questioned.
That is the bit AI cannot own. Not because it is not clever enough. Because judgement, especially when you are building something that has never been built before, requires a stake in the outcome and the ability to be held accountable for it. A model has neither. It has no skin in the decision and no one to answer to when the call is wrong. The novel work, the genuinely new design, is precisely where the tools are weakest and where the human is most needed. Maybe AGI changes this one day. For now I am certain agentic AI does not. The AI got faster. The decision stayed human.
Which brings me back to the forty.
I do not want a team of programmers. I do not want a team of testers. I want every single person at Midships to be an architect. By which I mean someone who owns their architecture, takes responsibility for it end to end, and does whatever it takes to deliver the right one to the customer, not the easy one, not the fashionable one, the right one. That is a high bar. It is why the team is small, and it is why every place on it is earned.
The cap is not a limit on our ambition. It is a statement about where the scarce resource now sits. The scarce thing in this era is not hands. AI has made hands cheap. The scarce thing is judgement, and judgement does not scale by hiring faster. It scales by keeping the team small enough that every person in it is the kind who carries it.
My team are still on a journey. Every one of them is building that judgement, the same way I built mine, on real problems with real consequences, and now with a course I wish I had been handed sooner. That journey is the investment. It is not a cost to be optimised away. It is the entire point.
Forty architects. Every seat earned. That is the business I want to run.
AUTONOMY. TRUSTED
Writer’s Overview
Ajit Gupta – Co-Founder & CEO, Midships
Ajit leads Midships Group’s transition from a specialist identity consultancy to a portfolio of autonomous, AI-native business units. He focuses on long-term business relevance through platform thinking, customer outcomes, and scalable operating models.
Short bio: Ajit is a strategic founder with deep expertise in IAM, platform delivery, and AI services, driving Midships’ expansion across Asia, the Middle East, and beyond.
Comments