Writing for founders and the people who build with them
The Agentic CTO — part 6 of 6
The greybeards are correct about AI code quality and the worried are correct that the org changes. You don't win either group with hype — you win them with a harness and honest maths.
Read the article →The Agentic CTO — part 0 · the foundation
Agent = model + harness. You rent the model; the harness is the part you own. Here is ours, product names included: the contract, the nine gates on main, the QA agent's cost curve, and the bill — about $1.40 per merged PR.
Read the article →The Agentic CTO — part 5 of 6
Block put a coding agent in 5,000 hands. The review data shows why most orgs that open the repo will drown — and why the gates from parts 1–4 are the whole difference.
Read the article →The Agentic CTO — part 4 of 6
Blast radius beats cleverness: a free-fire staging zone, read-versus-write production, a break-glass agent behind MFA — and why your ticket tracker is an attack surface.
Read the article →The Agentic CTO — part 3 of 6
Incidents, alerts and inbound bugs. The reaction ladder agents climb while you sleep, the weekend our pager stayed silent, and the backlog that triages itself.
Read the article →The Agentic CTO — part 2 of 6
Every merged PR teaches the system something. Maintenance loops that let the org find and fix its own bottlenecks — built in a day, debugging itself by lunch.
Read the article →The Agentic CTO — part 1 of 6
Over 1,000 PRs, 860 merged, one full-time engineer. The six-step SDLC you already run — with agents doing every role and humans holding two gates.
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