Technology versus Company Culture

15 Jan, 2026

Two quotes come to mind:

• The actions you do are your company culture.
• Be good because future AI is watching. - Andrej Karpathy

Taken together this means that for the first time, culture can be audited in real time. This might feel Orwellean.

But a russel conjugate of real time company cultural audits is process validation.

Here’s an example - daily standup.

These spiral into rabbit hole discussions, often someone talks way too much, and misses the standard format of Yesterday I Worked On, Today I Worked On, My Blockers Are OR No Blockers.

Enforcing the Yesterday, Today, and Blockers feels bad.

Someone has to interrupt or send a DM.

Is it better to have no standard? I’d argue no.

If you accept that having a format for daily standup improves team velocity. Then a tool that audits each person’s standup contribution every day to see if it matches the format is a win.

It allows humans to produce output, and leaves the verifcation of process and reminders to follow process to a non-human entity.

An automated Slack (or Teams) message like: “Hey Mike, you forgot to mention what you worked on yesterday in your update.”, gets around the human enforcement of standards.

Standards, is another way of saying culture.

And the larger question is does a company really want to change it’s culture?

While the following is a simplification, I’d argue that there are two types of companies:

A) Companies that are still trying to compete and win

B) Companies that aren’t

The challenge is that all companies will say they belong to Group A, rather than B.

Before AI enabling an audit, it was too costly for someone to do this cultural accounting.

But now a text file can be used to codify the cultural standards for a specific recurring meeting.

Here’s an example for standup:

- Everyone should give a an update in the following structure:
    - Yesterday (or last week), I worked on…
    - Today I’m working on
    - I’m blocked by… OR I’m not blocked
- Note: Damian and Sarah should be excluded from being required from giving updates.
- Please notify each person individually on Teams if they didn’t follow the format
    - Message: Hi [User Name], remember to [Insert thing they forgot or didn’t do right]

This requires some work under the hood to support the integrations and processing of text files. But it’s technically possible to support messaging, parsing of a text document like this, and all that it requires is an audio transcript + text file.

So, let’s assume this is technically possible. But what companies will adopt this?

I’d argue companies in Group A - those companies that are still trying to compete and win - will. And companies in Group B will fight like crazy against this type of technology.

The reasons against will be:

• Technology can’t get this right
• This is oppressive against me, some group, creative process, etc.
• This will get it wrong more often that it gets it right

But the real reason will be that businesses in Group B are by-and-large old monopolies where an increase in work doesn’t lead to increased compensation. So, the workers quickly race towards the bottom of virtue signaling combined with no output.

One of the best signals of companies being in Group A rather than Group B is the adoption of new accountability software.

Here’s another less tautological brainstorm of why will a person, a team, an org, or an entire company switches over to technology that enables cultural audits/process validation.

This new type of tool will be 10x better than working without it.

I can’t imagine writing software at a company that didn’t use git.

10 years from now, a common question new hires will ask before accepting an offer is how does this company maintain a high quality company culture?

And if the response doesn’t include we use XYZ software that enables real time feedback on our cultural standards/expected procedures. The candidate will run away as quickly as I would now, if I encountered a team that didn’t use git.

What performance will be audited?

A short list is:

• 1-on-1s
• Daily Standup Updates
• Amount of code shipped or removed
• Pace of communication?

But most work isn’t done via video calls.

Yes, some of the things mentioned above would require screen to OCRed vector storage.

OCRed screen screen data served over an MCP server enables answer to questions like:

• I’m new to this codebase, can you talk to me about who has contributed, what the main focuses of the project are, and give me a recommendation to get started
• What’s the current status of the Project XYZ
• How do I get access to this database?

At first glimpse this seems like a massive breach of personal privacy.

But I’d argue that workers are already monitored.

Your email belongs to your employer along with all your Slack or Teams message history.

A large function of JIRA is to provide a dashboard for managers a few levels above you to understand at scale who is doing what.

So, the tools already exist to determine how much work a person is doing.

The next generation of tools will be much better and more flexible.

The hope is that the new technology allows for individuals to glimpse a log of who accessed their work history.

This would mean that an IC could see all the access requests to their data.

Today, I don’t know when my boss, or my VP, pulls up my velocity chart on JIRA. And maybe I shouldn’t have visibility into this.

But I’d prefer to know. And this transparency improves accountability and makes the relationship between workers and managers clear.

To close, I believe that AI + Vector Storage will enable the rise of individuals in the workplace.

Because there will be a level of transparency into who is actually doing what that up until this moment hasn’t been possible.

Imagine a performance review that wasn’t based on reports from your coworkers on how you did… all workers game this system at large companies… but instead looked at what you actually did.

This new level of transparency also enables individuals to codify many aspects of their work that they couldn’t before. After a week of working and recording your work you could ask questions like:

• Please look at my last weekly update I sent out and create a template that I can use to draft updates in the future. Call this template weekly-update-guidelines.md and put it my how-I-work folder
• Please write a description called transition-of-product-responsibility.md so that I can handoff the work I’ve been doing
• Please look at how I spent my time this month and create an email to share with my team

The most fun places to work are the places with the sharpest tools.

A tool that enables work audit, also may enable the things above. And I'd use a tool like like this because it increases my velocity, boosts transparency, and increases trust.

In summary - AI + vector storage enables a new type of tool. This is an open ended MCP server that can answer any question related to what has occurred on the team in the past. And this technology will be adopted by high-performing teams and avoided by other teams.

This tool should be called Memex. Because it collects screen history and audio history and makes it instantly available.

I hope that:

1. This tool gets created.
2. It's created in a way that respects individual privacy.
3. It makes work more efficient and fun. Because it allows for new types of data retrieval, improvement of company standards, and gets rid of painfully out of date company wikis.

If you’d like to try one implementation of this type of Memex, you can get the open source code here.

Thanks for reading!