I set up AI coding agents for small teams: a software factory of agents working in parallel and unattended, from spec to ship, built on my own agent harness, Skelcrew.
Update: the offer has changed since I wrote this. I now set up software factories for small teams and can run them for you. See Work with me for the current details.
I've been experimenting with AI coding tools since April, and in September I started building Skelcrew, my ...
I ran a quick test to find out. The short answer is yes, but a plain AGENTS.md matters almost as much, and it costs nothing.
The experiment
I'm building the fourth version of Skelcrew, a tool that runs coding agents unattended. When it was time to build the core, the part th...
"We are all becoming factory engineers."
That line is from Zach Lloyd's talk on software factories, which I highly recommend.
Building the thing that builds the product
In a software factory, agents do each step, from spec to code to review to ship. Each step has a clear job...
This morning I finally got around to building myself an AI shed, as David Heinemeier Hansson calls it: a small server of my own where the agents live and work.
The setup
It's a small Hetzner server behind Tailscale, with Herdr and Skelcrew on it.
Tailscale puts the server on...
A few weeks ago I spent a weekend camping with friends, and what struck me most was the relief of not talking to an agent.
Leading a team through Slack
At work I'm in conversation with them all day. It's like leading a team of developers where the only tool you have is Slack...
It's such a paradox. As a programmer, I've never been more productive. I'm producing 10x more code, and the quality is higher too.
Yet I've never felt more impatient.
The rush
I can be on my 10th PR of the day and feel frustrated that it's moving too slowly. It's like an add...
I've been hacking on something in my evenings that I'm pretty excited about.
It's a harness for building software with coding agents, but instead of a chat it's more like a project board.
How it works
When you have a new feature or a fix you want built, you file it as a card...
A month ago I wrote about rebuilding Jottit, the tool Aaron Swartz and I made in 2007. It's live now, and so is Tinypost. Both were built alone, in about six months.
The shipped apps are the smaller half of the year. The rest went into experiments: memory layers for AI agent...
Last year I quit my job to rebuild something from my past.
Jottit was a tool Aaron Swartz and I made in 2007, back when the web was small and personal and a little weird. You typed something, clicked a button, and had a page online. It disappeared years ago, and I always reg...
I posted the other day about basepage, the local-first tool I'm building that lets you point an agent at a folder of files and have it build and publish a site. Someone replied with a flat objection: AI is the opposite of the indieweb.
His case was clean. The indieweb is abo...
For most of my career, the constraint was building. You had an idea, and then you spent weeks or months making it real. The gap between the idea and the working thing was where almost all the effort went.
That gap has mostly closed. With AI, I can build a prototype of almost...
In 2007, Aaron Swartz and I built a small tool called Jottit. The idea was simple: make it as easy as possible to put a page on the web. You typed something, clicked a button, and got a page on a secret URL. You didn't need to create an account first. If you wanted to keep i...
I just shipped comments for Tinypost. Here's how they work.
If you're the blog owner and you're logged in, you just type and post. Your name shows up with an "author" badge next to it.
If you're a reader, you enter your name, email, and comment. Tinypost sends you a verifica...
I've been quiet for a bit (moving house, painting walls) but I also made a big decision about Jottit.
When Aaron Swartz and I built Jottit in 2007, it was a very specific thing: the simplest way to make a web page. You'd type something, hit save, and you had a page. That was...
Blogrolls used to be everywhere. In the early web, your sidebar had a list of blogs you read. A simple way to say "these people are worth your time." Then social media came along and sociality moved to the feed. Your reading habits became algorithmic and the humble blogroll ...
When I started building the original Jottit back in 2007, I was a CS student with no kids and no mortgage to worry about. Almost 20 years later, with four children and a family to support, the question of funding looks a little different.
I was incredibly fortunate to receiv...
Today I'm beginning work on IndieAuth endpoints for Jottit. The goal is to let people publish to their Jottit sites from any Micropub client, whether that's web apps, mobile apps, or desktop tools.
IndieAuth is OAuth 2.0 for the open web. Users authenticate with their own do...
The core idea of the original Jottit that we built in 2007 was frictionless publishing. You could build your own site just by clicking a button. You didn't have to create an account and the UI was so simple you didn't have to think much about how it worked.
Frictionless publ...
In April 2007, Aaron Swartz sent me an email asking what I was up to. I told him I wasn't really up to any exciting projects and suggested that perhaps we build something together. Aaron was already busy on other projects, but was willing to offer his remaining bandwidth advising me.
He also had an idea. He called it createapage.com: you go to the site, there's a text box, you type stuff in, hit save, and you get a page at a random URL.
The radical simplicity instantly got me excited.
"The cognitive load is so tiny that you just go ahead and use it without even thinking about whether you should or not," Aaron wrote.
