Tenex pays AI engineers for output, not hours, as team grows to 75

Tenex cofounders Alex Lieberman and CJ Hess discuss shifting engineer compensation from hourly rates to output-based pay as AI increases productivity. The company of 75 people has split its customer base between Fortune 2000 and mid-market businesses. Tenex uses MetaHarness, a shared set of skills, project documents and a CLI, to make engineering work legible for AI agents. The team also experimented with replacing a $43,000-a-year speaker-management SaaS tool through a Kill My SaaS competition.