I can’t afford to work any more

Building the systems, not doing the work

Sunday night, 9pm. I’m copy-pasting LinkedIn URLs into a file because that’s the input my agent expects in the morning. It’s the third time this month I’ve done this exact thing. The agent does the heavy lifting. I do the prep. And the prep, it turns out, is the bottleneck.

So on Monday I’m going to stop working.

I already have a small agentic team partnering with me on most of what I used to do, and we’re moving at 2-3x my pre-agentic velocity. That’s not enough. 10x-100x is accessible to me, and to anyone else, if I invest in the specifications, the verifications and the tooling instead of plodding alongside the agents.

The solopreneurial struggle

Building Gather, I need to identify and book speakers, find venues, and run logistics. I need to record, edit and drop video, podcast, social and articles from every interview. I need to identify and qualify potential community members, communicate with the community, and help out with the common issues.

I need to research trends in agentic AI and engineering leadership. I need to keep up with the bleeding edge in harness design. I need to build my own harness and use it to run the business and deliver a wide range of applications.

I need to host events in NYC, the Bay Area, and online, and figure out how to scale to 15-20 cities by year’s end without lowering the quality bar or hiring a human. I also need to experiment with what a community for engineering leaders looks like when all of their communications are intermediated by their agentic team. Between that, a kid and a life, I’m usually behind the curve.

I can’t afford to work

So this week I’m finally taking the time not just to do tasks, but to write a rich, multi-step recipe for every repeatable one. If I do research, I want to identify and capture sources, then extract, de-dupe, classify and enrich the people, companies, publications and platforms they’re on. I want to extract insights and map them to a rich taxonomy, with patterns for adding new nodes to the knowledge graph for unknown unknowns, and for archiving or re-parenting nodes as the field shifts.

This is painful. It takes time to thoughtfully describe a high-value pipeline with clear validation and verification steps. And I don’t currently have a working orchestrator, so I need to make some pragmatic choices between a lightweight (perhaps file-based) notebook that keeps track of flows, and just building out a proper orchestrator with o11y and maintenance models and tools for cleanup and the rest of the patterns required to deliver a robust solution.

Hopefully my pragmatism wins over my perfectionism. I’ll prototype with an in-memory supervisor pattern, sub-agents using a semi-structured markdown file as an agreed recipe. If I like that, I’ll describe a DSL for the workflows and a schema validator to make sure they’re well-formed. Then I’ll build the simplest possible orchestrator to instantiate a run in the database and track state with enums, and finally I’ll add the edge-case handling as my agents find new ways to break things on the way to an entirely automated org.

Your team can’t afford to work either

Why am I sharing my solopreneurial woes with you? Whether you have a small team or a large org, it can be hard to find the time to invest in the future of the agentic SDLC when you have a backlog, bugs, customers, interdependent projects and a full set of commitments you need to deliver to meet promises to customers, or to match your planned release cadence.

But if you are not investing in teaching your agents how to write code, you’re going to get passed by teams in your industry that are doubling down on that today.

A million LoC in a month

Sam Schillace is a Deputy CTO in the Office of the CTO at Microsoft. He ran a ~600-person team at Google and ran engineering at Box, so he knows what it takes to deliver secure, reliable code at scale. His team shipped Amplifier, one of the least hyped and most interesting agentic tools I’ve seen.

The other month, he personally shipped a million lines of code. To be fair, he didn’t deploy them to production, and lines of code is a terrible and easily gamable metric. But one engineer, with a tuned harness and years of experience with LLMs, basically replicated Microsoft Word using web technologies in a month. The future is coming, and it’s not just 40% faster.

Can you see the speed?

The most common refrain I’m hearing is “if dark factories are so capable, how come nobody is shipping anything to production?” Truth is, they are. You can already see it if you know where to look.

The most visible example is the Claude Code team. There have been security issues and bugs and all the usual side effects you see when it is genuinely economically rational to move really fast and break things. But they’re also genuinely moving fast. Look at the size of the team, the number of customers, and the speed of shipping. This is not just Boris Cherny and the team using auto-complete to speed up the typing in their IDEs.

For most of you reading this, the bigger concern is your competitors who may be investing in this and you haven’t seen what they’re doing yet.

It reminds me of building a skyscraper. For a long time all you see is a big hole in the ground. Then once the architecture is locked, the permits obtained, and the foundations laid, the stories go up with remarkable speed.

Building an agentic SDLC requires a substantial change in how your teams work, a lot of training to help them understand this new way of delivering software and a lot of incremental experiments to encode what good software development means specifically within your company. For a team in a large org, expect weeks or months to accelerate delivery by 5x to 10x. (Solo, with a tuned harness, the ceiling is higher; that’s the 10x-100x I’m aiming for personally.)

If one of your competitors gets there first, by the time you see the results in their product announcements you are probably six months behind on being able to replicate it within your own org. And at the pace companies can ship at with a fully agentic SDLC, six months is the equivalent of being years behind at a more traditional pace.

How confident are you that the permits, the architecture and the foundations are in place in your engineering team for when your competitors start shipping at agentic speed?