AI for the Fortune 2000: How Tenex Builds an AI-Native SDLC — Alex Lieberman & CJ Hess

Tenex co-founder Alex Lieberman and director of engineering CJ Hess returned to Latent Space to describe how their 75-person firm has evolved from an AI-powered dev shop into an applied AI partner for Fortune 2000 companies. The conversation centered on their unusual compensation model, the engineering workflows that let agents handle long-running tasks, and the messy reality of deploying AI inside large enterprises.

Paying for output, not time

Tenex compensates engineers by story points rather than hours. The bet is that AI lets a skilled engineer parallelize enormous amounts of work, and the person who pushes hardest on the frontier should capture that upside. The highest-paid engineer now earns roughly four times what the lowest-paid engineer does — not the tenfold gap the name implies, but still a wide dispersion. Lieberman said the classic objections — that story points are subjective, that engineers will sandbag estimates or ship bad code — have not materialized. The reason is a second incentive layer: AI strategists (technical consultants who lead client engagements) are rewarded for customer retention and growth, which naturally checks quality.