We don’t screen candidates for AI experience. We screen for judgment. Some find this surprising, given what we do.  Here’s our logic.

In 2008, 37signals wrote a post called "Hire Managers of One". The idea is straightforward, powerful, and has aged well: the best person you can hire is someone who sets their own goals and executes them without being managed. Eighteen years on, it is still sound hiring advice. But the nature of work has changed, so for us it’s the Manager of One+AI: someone who can manage themselves, and their AI, to get real work done. Having the basic skills and disposition for the job is a given.

Beyond job skills, "+AI" is not "use as much AI as possible." Too many firms focus myopically on productivity. Spin up a swarm of agents, generate more, ship faster. This is costly and counterproductive. Productivity without judgment leads to scaling errors (with nothing learned). Worse, it teaches you to trust wrong answers because they look polished, and that is what hurts the business.

The key skill is not using AI tools. Tools are learnable, and change rapidly anyway. The key skill is judgment: knowing what "good" looks like for the task in front of you. Knowing when an AI result is genuinely useful. When it is close, but not quite there. When it is confidently, fluently wrong. And, most important and often overlooked, when not to reach for AI at all.

This is in our DNA. It is what we build and how we work. We build Superminds: custom systems that tightly couple our clients' hard-won expertise with AI, with human judgment at the gates. We run intoMO the same way: we use AI projects to hold context and memory, we turn the work that repeats into AI skills, and we build our own internal Superminds for the work that is worth it. AI runs through our whole day. Judgment is what decides where it goes.

Being software geeks, we visualize it thus:

\o/ + </>

Do you need to be an AI guru?  No. A little AI foundation helps. We can teach you the rest. What we look for is sound thinking, clear logic, and the instinct for good vs. good-enough (vs. no). Bring that, and the drive to dive in and figure things out, and you will be right at home.

If you can tell good from good-enough, and you know when to close the laptop and think, you are already most of the way to being a Manager of One+AI. The rest you’ll learn by doing.  And we’ll be there to help.

_________________________
John Miniati is the Co-Founder and CEO of intoMO, a boutique AI systems firm that designs and builds Superminds: production-grade AI systems for judgment-driven businesses. Reach out for more information: info@intomo.ai.