Writing
Notes on building companies.
- 3 min
How many things still start only with you?
The close of the series: the eight areas that tell you whether AI is multiplying your team or just your review load — and a scorecard to find your lowest number.
- 3 min
We stopped working one thing at a time
Julio, this raised my productivity at least 3x. Worktrees let one engineer run several agents on different features in parallel — but only because the system underneath was ready.
- 3 min
I stopped being the documentation
Julio, how does this work? Every how-do-we-do-it-here question landed on me — I was the documentation. Moving that context into the repo ended the questions, and it's why an agent shipped a complete feature on the first try.
- 3 min
Support stopped routing through me
Guys, a client reported this. I was the human router between support and engineering. Removing the bridge ended the ticket ping-pong: report → engineer → agent → fixed → client.
- 3 min
An agent score replaced my review
One day to build, one day waiting for review — usually mine. Now PRs scored 4/5 or 5/5 by an agent ship without a human reading them. Months in production, no surprises.
- 3 min
We started designing in code
Julio, is the design ready? The fix wasn't hiring a designer. It was letting engineers design in code, behind feature flags — because code got cheap enough to be the sketch.
- 3 min
Features stopped starting with me
Every big feature started with me on a client call. Recording the calls and handing the definition to the team felt uncomfortable — until they stopped needing me.
- 3 min
Bad software has nowhere left to hide
For years a great sales team could beat a great product. AI collapsed the cost of building well — and 'it's too hard to build' stopped being a strategy.
- 2 min
Sell from day one
You don't need a finished product to start selling. A 5-day prototype opened the conversations — and the 30 days before the first payment were enough to build the first real version with a design partner.
- 3 min
Engineering is going to eat the org chart
A line from Jared Palmer stuck with me. The shift isn't hiring more engineers — it's more people operating with an engineering mindset. Welcome the full-stack operator.
- 2 min
We rebuilt in 4 months what took us 10 years to build.
It wasn't about handing engineers an AI tool and expecting 10x. It was changing the whole system we build with.