The Orchestrator's Real Workload: Decision Burden, Framing Discipline, and Whether Taste Scales

Three-question synthesis of the founder/orchestration cluster. (1) The orchestrator's net cognitive load is higher and reshaped, not lower: execution tasks leave, but what replaces them — parallel oversight and planning decisions — is the layer where fatigue produces the worst errors (+39% major errors) and where rubber-stamping is transcript-invisible; the July 2026 evidence adds that oversight value is non-monotonic (HAS-Bench's returns-curve with a peak; over-intervention breaks tasks) and that concurrency telemetry measures agent effort, not human attention — so the load is bounded only by deliberate redesign (bounded parallelism, sampled review, high-stakes concentration), and no instrument yet measures founder oversight load directly. (2) The playbook-vs-HBR framing tension was already resolved operationally by the May reconciliation — orchestration-as-workflow-design survives the critique, orchestration-as-coworker-mental-model does not — and the July evidence strengthens the workflow side: decision-rights gating now has measured backing (control-channel authorization 100% on safety-critical actions) while naming-drift accountability effects remain the cost of the mental-model side. (3) Dogfooding itself cannot scale — first-hand use is per-person and breaks when the team stops being the user — but the taste it produces scales through two named encodings: evals-as-product-spec (taste as runnable artifacts) and the rare-trusted-evaluator ritual (a handful of tastemakers + vibe-checks); AI adds a third (first-pass analysis of every user conversation). The cap variable is not org size but team-user distance plus encoding discipline — an org reverts to dashboards when it stops encoding, not when it passes a headcount