TL;DR• Software is going the way of every industrialized domain: the factory is the product, I'm the bottleneck, and my job is now to remove myself from it.
It is both pretty exciting but also a bit nerve-wracking to have your decade-old job turning into something you barely recognize.
I used to take pleasure in coding with deep, highly focused sessions; I am now juggling 20+ parallel agentic sessions all day. Brain-wise, it is not the same stimulus and honestly feels a bit weird.
While I used to avoid any distraction to preserve the “flow”, I am now constantly switching contexts to unblock my agents and guide them to the next step, while also trying to optimize my rate limits as best as possible, a newfound critical discipline.
A typical day is no longer a problem I sit with. It’s a queue: one session waiting on a permission, one stuck on a failing build it cannot see the cause of, one that finished twenty minutes ago and nobody noticed. My job is starting to look like a Factorio game, except the belts are rate limits.
The last twenty percent
The factory does ship, though. In the last few months it has produced a dozen native macOS and iOS apps, side ideas that had been sitting half-built on a disk for years because finishing them was never worth the evenings it would have cost. None of them would have existed a year ago. An app that cuts the background out of a whole photo shoot, one that turns a meeting into a transcript that knows who spoke, a route planner built on official survey maps, a release radar for the upstream projects I depend on.
Each one would have started the way my side projects always did, as a proof of concept, quick and fun, and stalled where they always stalled: the last twenty percent of polish that takes eighty percent of the time. A small, focused open-source tool could make it out the door. A whole app, something a stranger could install and keep using, never did. That ceiling is gone.
The factory is the product
At this pace I will be looking after hundreds of apps next year, and the lesson every industrialized domain learned before software is becoming obvious here too: “the factory is the product”. I am the bottleneck in it. So my job is now, quite literally, to remove myself from the equation, as quickly as possible. Counter-intuitive, but a surprisingly good source of fun.
In practice that means every time I do something twice by hand, it becomes a skill the agents run on their own: the App Store screenshots, the icon variants, the release notes, the TestFlight push, the market check on a shipped app. The interesting work has moved from writing code to writing down how the code gets written, and to noticing where the process still needs me.
Access
Removing myself also means the agents have to reach everything I reach, so most of the tooling ended up being about access. I have published dozens of MCP servers and two tools to run that factory:
- Bastion, which runs each MCP server once for every client on the Mac, with credentials in the Keychain and every call logged.
- Cupertino, which lets an agent into your Apple-ecosystem data without handing it the keys.
The endpoint
None of this is end-to-end yet, but the gaps close every month and I see nothing that would stop them. The endpoint is not a faster me but one that is no longer needed: my sense of design, the small preferences I could not spell out if you asked, extracted into a large personal corpus and the skills built on it. At which point I am not sure which of us is the product.
Giving agents that much reach has a flip side, what happens when something else gets hold of it, and that is the subject of the next post.