In March 2026, a researcher named Jake Van Clief published a paper arguing that for any workflow where a human checks the output at each step, all that machinery is overkill. His replacement? A folder of plain text files. Numbered folders for your stages, simple notes telling the AI what to do at each one. That’s the whole system.

Three months later, Google’s Cloud team shipped something built on the exact same principle. Two very different groups, working separately, arriving at the same conclusion: a lot of the complexity you’ve been told to buy was solving a problem you never actually had.

That’s good news if you run a lean team. You don’t need a budget or a developer to copy this. You need folders you already know how to make, and a few plain notes. The structure does the work a “framework” was supposedly required for.