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agentCLAWHUBUnverified

Dunbar's Number

Activate when: team headcount is approaching or crossing 150 (or 50, or 500); someone says "coordination is getting harder," "we lost the startup feel," or "... Skill: Dunbar's Number Owner: deciqai Summary: Activate when: team headcount is approaching or crossing 150 (or 50, or 500); someone says "coordination is getting harder," "we lost the startup feel," or "... Tags: latest:1.0.5 Version history: v1.0.5 | 2026-07-16T17:58:23.932Z | user Description tail link + agents machine-readable metadata line (deciqai.com/s/dunbars-number.json) v1.0.4 | 2026-07-09T11:17:07.941Z | u

OpenClaw

View on ClawHub Homepage

Rank

Safety

Downloads

1.2k

Updated

Oct 11, 2026

Version

1.0.5

Source

CLAWHUB

About

What it does, and when to use it.

Capability contract not published. No trust telemetry is available yet. 1.2K downloads reported by the source. Last updated 10/11/2026.

Avoid when

Contract metadata is missing or unavailable for deterministic execution.

Risk flags: missing_or_unavailable_contract, trust_data_unavailable, schema_references_missing

Public facts

Every fact links back to the source it came from.

Vendor: Clawhubvendor · observed Oct 11, 2026
Protocol compatibility: OpenClawcompatibility · observed Oct 11, 2026
Adoption signal: 1.2K downloadsadoption · observed Oct 11, 2026
Latest release: 1.0.5release · observed Jul 16, 2026
Handshake status: UNKNOWNsecurity

Install and run

Setup complexity: low.

clawhub skill install s17a4mqcnk515kvaca5ze55d0x88pfpx:dunbars-number

Setup complexity is classified as HIGH. You must provision dedicated cloud infrastructure or an isolated VM. Do not run this directly on your local workstation.
Final validation: Expose the agent to a mock request payload inside a sandbox and trace the network egress before allowing access to real customer data.

Contract: missing

curl -s "https://www.xpersona.co/api/v1/agents/clawhub-deciqai-dunbars-number/snapshot"

Documentation

CLAWHUB

112,233 characters of source documentation, loaded on request.

Extracted files

5 files captured from the source.

SKILL.md

---
name: dunbars-number
description: >
  Activate when: team headcount is approaching or crossing 150 (or 50, or 500); someone says
  "coordination is getting harder," "we lost the startup feel," or "we don't know who does what
  anymore"; deciding whether to split a team, open a new office, or add a management layer.
  Do NOT activate when: group is well below 50 and problems are clearly interpersonal; core issue
  is incentive misalignment rather than group size (use principal-agent instead).
  More: deciqai.com/c/dunbars-number
---

# Dunbar's Number

## Overview

**Dunbar's number** (~150) is the cognitive limit on stable social groups the human neocortex can sustain, with nested layers at ~5, ~15, ~50, then outer bands at ~500 and ~1,500. Derived by Robin Dunbar (1992) from primate neocortex ratios. Key implication: **below ~150, informal trust coordinates behavior; above ~150, formal hierarchy becomes architecturally mandatory** — not a cultural choice.

Composes with `network-effects` (different coordination mechanisms below vs. above 150), `principal-agent` (exceeding 150 multiplies agency problems informal trust can no longer cover), `founder-mindset` (founder relationship bandwidth peaks at ~150 — first breakpoint demanding shift from doing to delegating structure).

## When to Use

- Headcount approaching or crossing 150 (or 50, or 500)
- "Coordination getting harder" complaints with no obvious structural cause
- Deciding to split a team, open a new office, or create a sub-unit
- Designing org structure for a scaling startup; evaluating acquisition integration plans
- Diagnosing why informal culture "felt different" after a headcount milestone
- AI-native startup hiring fast on abundant AI-era capital / AI-adoption demand — "we scaled from 20 to 150 in a year and coordination is breaking"

**Not when:** group well below 50 and problems are interpersonal; constraint is incentive misalignment (use `principal-agent`); challenge is growing a network beyond 150 (use `network-effects`).

## Coaching Novices (Adaptive Front Door)

- **Engine mode:** user has a concrete org design or headcount question → run The Process directly.
- **Coach mode:** user is unfamiliar → guide step by step.

In Coach mode, respond one step at a time. Each [WAIT] is a hard stop — output only that step's question, then stop.

1. One-liner: once a group exceeds ~150 people, informal trust cannot coordinate it — formal structure is architecturally required by the human neocortex.
2. Check fit: what is the current headcount? Which Dunbar layer, which breakpoint is approaching?
3. Elicit the structure: what coordination mechanisms exist? Where are they breaking down?
> **[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]**
4. Run The Process one step at a time with their input.
> **[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]**
5. Close: group layer + breakpoint diagnosis + structural prescription (split / formalize / layer) named.
> **[WAIT — do not advance until user respon

_meta.json

{
  "ownerId": "kn754b8sk22s8c6gjxt02bftbn88q7ye",
  "slug": "dunbars-number",
  "version": "1.0.5",
  "publishedAt": 1784224703932
}

references/sources.md

# Sources — dunbars-number

> *Primary sources for the [dunbars-number](../SKILL.md) skill.*

- Dunbar, R. I. M. (1992). "Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates." *Journal of Human Evolution*, 22(6), 469–493. The original empirical paper.
- Dunbar, R. I. M. (2010). *How Many Friends Does One Person Need?* Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0674057166. Accessible treatment with organizational extensions.
- Gladwell, M. (2000). *The Tipping Point.* Little, Brown. ISBN 978-0316346627. Chapter 5: Gore case + Dunbar number in organizational design.
- Dunbar, R. I. M. (1998). "The social brain hypothesis." *Evolutionary Anthropology*, 6(5), 178–190. The social brain hypothesis underpinning the neocortex constraint.
- Hill, R. A., & Dunbar, R. I. M. (2003). "Social network size in humans." *Human Nature*, 14(1), 53–72. Empirical validation of the 150 figure via social network analysis.
- Gore, W. L. "The Lattice Organization — A Philosophy of Enterprise." Internal document distributed to Gore associates (circa 1976). The Gore founding philosophy. (Not a formally published journal article; the widely cited secondary source for Gore's ~150 plant cap is Gladwell 2000, Ch. 5, above.)
- Dunbar, R. I. M. (2021). "Dunbar's number: why my theory that humans can only maintain 150 friendships has withstood 30 years of scrutiny." *The Conversation*, May 2021. Dunbar's own 30-year restatement — the limit is a cognitive/neocortical constraint, not one technology (social media, collaboration tools, or AI) can raise.
- On the 2023–2026 AI funding-and-hiring environment: contemporaneous, widely reported venture-capital concentration in AI and rapid headcount growth at leading AI-native companies (e.g., ongoing press coverage of OpenAI and Anthropic scaling). Cited as a well-documented general pattern for the "capital compresses the timeline to each Dunbar breakpoint" claim — not as any single unverified figure.

examples/ai-native-startup-scaling-2023-2026.md

# Method in Action: Scaling an AI-Native Startup Team (2023–2026)

> *Example for the [dunbars-number](../SKILL.md) skill.*

Between 2023 and 2026, a distinctive class of company emerged: the **AI-native startup**. Powered by generative-AI product demand and an unusually deep venture-funding environment for AI, these companies raised large rounds early and hired far faster than the classic SaaS growth curve. The pattern that recurred — reported across founder essays, investor commentary, and press coverage of companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and a wave of well-funded application-layer startups — is that **capital compresses the timeline to each Dunbar breakpoint**. A team that historically took three or four years to reach 150 people can now cross that line in twelve to eighteen months. The neocortical limit does not move; the calendar does. So the ~50 and ~150 breakpoints, where informal trust fails and formal structure becomes mandatory, arrive sooner than the founders' intuition expects. This example walks the anchor case through the skill's six-step Process.

---

**Step 1 — Identify layer.** Take a representative AI-native startup that raised a large early round and grew from roughly 20 to roughly 160 people inside about a year and a half. At 20 the company sits in the **affinity-group layer (15–50)** — informal coordination still works. Its trajectory takes it through the **~50 breakpoint** (approaching the ceiling of what direct mutual knowledge supports) and toward the **~150 Dunbar limit** where formal hierarchy becomes architecturally mandatory. Distance-to-breakpoint is the critical number: growing at even five to ten hires a month, the ~50 line is a few months out and the ~150 line arrives within the funding cycle — not "someday."

**Step 2 — Audit coordination.** Early on, coordination is pure informal trust: the founders know every engineer, decisions happen in a shared channel, and there is no documented process. The observable breakdowns as headcount climbs are the classic Dunbar symptoms — "we don't know who owns what anymore," duplicated work between teams that didn't know the other existed, onboarding that no longer happens by osmosis, and founders becoming a decision bottleneck. In AI-native firms these show up faster because so many hires are senior and expensive, and because rapid model/product iteration multiplies the number of in-flight decisions.

**Step 3 — Diagnose mismatch.** Below 50, direct knowledge is adequate; the AI startup's early informal style *matched* its size. Crossing 50 into the 50–150 band, the mechanism must shift to **structured trust** — explicit roles, reporting lines, and lightweight process. Approaching 150, the mismatch becomes acute: informal trust is being asked to coordinate a group that has exceeded the neocortex's capacity to track every relationship. The root cause is **architectural, not interpersonal** — the very trap the skill's Red Flags warn about ("communication problems diagnosed

examples/dunbar-1992-wl-gore-associates.md

# Method in Action: Dunbar 1992 + W.L. Gore & Associates

> *Example for the [dunbars-number](../SKILL.md) skill.*

**Robin Dunbar** (b. 1947) is a British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist at the University of Oxford. His 1992 paper originated in a specific observation: across primates, species with larger neocortex ratios live in larger stable social groups. The neocortex, the "thinking" part of the brain responsible for social cognition, appears to be the binding constraint on social group size — because maintaining stable relationships requires tracking each person's identity, reliability, relationship history, and current status relative to every other group member. The cognitive load scales with group size, and at some point the neocortex hits capacity.

Dunbar analyzed 38 primate genera, measuring neocortex ratio and mean social group size. The regression line, extrapolated to human neocortex size, predicted a stable group size of 147.8 — consistently rounded to 150. Dunbar then cross-validated:

> "Predicted group size for humans on the basis of our neocortex volume is 147.8. ... The distributions of group sizes for hunter-gatherer societies, Neolithic farming villages, and modern communities all peak in the range 150–200 individuals."
>
> — Dunbar, R. I. M. (1992). "Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates." *Journal of Human Evolution*, 22(6), 469–493, p. 488.

The cross-validation hit multiple independent data streams: 21 hunter-gatherer societies (median group size 148.4); Neolithic village sizes from archaeological remains; Roman military units (the *centuria*, nominally 80 men, sits in the 50-layer; the *cohors* of 480 sits between 500 and 150 layers, requiring formal centurion hierarchy); Hutterite agricultural communities (mandated split at 150 for centuries before Dunbar's paper).

**W.L. Gore & Associates** is the most-cited modern organizational case. Bill Gore founded the company in 1958 after leaving DuPont, where he had observed that small, informal groups produced dramatically better innovation than large, hierarchically managed ones. He built Gore on a "lattice structure" — no formal hierarchy, no titles, no bosses, only "sponsors" and "associates." The principle was that coordination through relationships was more efficient than coordination through hierarchy.

Gore discovered empirically — before Dunbar published — that the lattice structure broke down above approximately 150 people. The solution: every plant was capped at 150. When a plant grew to capacity, a new plant was opened, often literally next door. By the late 1990s, Gore had 11,000+ employees across dozens of plants, each under 150 — and still maintained its lattice structure with minimal hierarchy.

Gladwell's documentation of the Gore case (2000, *The Tipping Point*, Chapter 5) introduced Dunbar's number to a mass business audience. The Gore case demonstrates that the 150-person cap is not a theory — it is a structural engineering

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