I’ve been thinking about what happens when someone builds a really good team of AI agents at work.
Not just one chatbot. A whole setup. One agent researches accounts, another drafts proposals, another keeps the CRM clean, and another catches the things that usually fall through the cracks.
The person who built that team is going to be incredibly valuable.
So when they leave the company, what happens to the agents?
When I hire someone, I’m hiring their experience and competencies. I’m trusting they can take what they know and apply it to a new opportunity. I don’t expect them to bring their old company’s code with them. But I do expect them to bring their judgment, their skills, and the way they think about solving problems.
Agents make that line harder to see. A person can turn some of that judgment into a system that does work for them. Now the question is: if you build the thing that lets you do your work, who gets to keep it?
Imagine someone spends a year building a team of agents that knows how to get work done. It’s tuned to their judgment. It knows the steps they take, the rules they’ve developed, and when to hand something back to a person.
Then they get hired somewhere else.
Do they start over? Does the first company keep the whole team? Can the person bring the system with them and adapt it to the new job? Where does the IP of the agentic system belong? And how much of the logic can they carry over before it starts to look like copying the old company’s system or trade secrets?
It’s easy to imagine the obvious line: you can’t copy the code from your old job and drop it into your new one. But what about the way the system works? The sequence of steps, the rules the agent follows, the judgment built into its handoffs? If you rebuild all of that from scratch, is it now your craft, or did you just recreate something your old company considers a secret?
This reminds me of no-poach clauses. The old version is about companies agreeing not to hire each other’s people. I can imagine a future version where the person is free to leave, but the team of agents they built has to stay behind.
“Go ahead and hire her. The agents are ours.”
That would create a strange kind of mobility. The worker gets to move, but some of the thing that made them exceptional stays with the old employer. Their experience travels with them. Their trained workflows, tools, and encoded judgment might not.
I can also imagine the opposite. People start showing up to work with a suit of agents they have a claim over. Not company files or confidential information. Their own tools and ways of working, ready to be adapted to a new team. You’re not only hiring someone with experience. You’re hiring someone who already has a small crew working alongside them.
That changes the value of an employee. The person who can build a great agent team may be able to take on much more work, or help an entire department move faster. Their value is partly in what they know and partly in the system they’ve built to put that knowledge to work.
We’re used to people taking their skills with them when they leave a job. Agents make those skills visible and executable. They turn part of a person’s way of working into something another company might want to hire, license, or keep.
Maybe the next thing people negotiate at work won’t just be salary and equity. It’ll be which agents they can take with them, and which parts of their own judgment they’re allowed to rebuild.
— Elijah