juanre

Intelligence has to become a commodity. If your setup does not allow you to hot-swap a Claude Code with a Pi running astra and move on, you will be in trouble.

Five years ago I was spending up to €1000 a day in Google ads for my star-map company, Greaterskies. After a few months of meetings with an ever-rotating group of "experts" working for Google, and advising me in my ads strategy, I had reached a point where most of my revenue was going to Google. What was left was barely enough to keep going.

This is what capture feels like. You still own your company, but you are essentially an operator making money for someone else.

I think this will be the fate of people who allow their processes to be captured by the model providers. Always run at least two harnesses, and make sure that they are swappable.

All of the above, depending on how important it is. The "trust it", however, is always after an independent review by another agent.

My two sons are programmers, like me. We also went through a similar process after Claude Code and Codex became good enough, sometime around November 2025.

The key is, in my view: "I have several agents running in parallel [...] None of them needs me all the time. Every one of them needs me sometimes." This is what kills flow. Constant context switching plus having to understand the detail is really hard, and leads to exhaustion and burnout.

The solution for us has been to scale up. These days we can each manage on the order of 100 agents, working in different projects. I only talk to five or so coordinators, and to the ones that are implementing particularly tricky features.

Which means that I get to think, and pause, and focus again. It is not the same state of mind I had when actually crafting code, but it is fun again.

+1 to The Reverse Centaur, but I don't think it matches what the author describes. As a VP of Technology he presumably has some latitude in choosing what to work on.

I agree. I work in a similar way, and it is quite like managing developers. One difference though: I have no compunction against asking them to write incredibly tedious and long end-to-end tests exercising the user journeys with playwright and an actual db and backend. That helps a lot in making it more likely that regressions will not happen.

Sure you can, but it is really important to set things up so that work is manageable by you. It's not only the skills, it's the capabilities, and secrets, and shared docs, and messaging. Just for fun, these are the agents I have working right now, a mix of Claude Code, Codex and Pi, reported by one of my agents. They coordinate, they do everything that Duet etc can do... but I own the learning:

Juan, across all three machines there are 101 agents. They're in 10 workspaces and 9 aweb teams.

  ┌─────────────────┬─────────────────────────────────────────────┬────────┬─────────────────────────────────────┐
  │     Machine     │           Workspace (deployment)            │ Agents │                Teams                │
  ├─────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼─────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ this Mac        │ awebai/ac (aweb)                            │ 45     │ aweb:juan.aweb.ai                   │
  ├─────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼─────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ this Mac        │ juanre/jro (jro, Gandalf is here)           │ 17     │ jro:jro.aweb.ai                     │
  ├─────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼─────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ this Mac        │ awebai/oats (oats)                          │ 11     │ default:oats.aweb.ai,               │
  │                 │                                             │        │ aweb:juan.aweb.ai                   │
  ├─────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼─────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ this Mac        │ juanre/na**** (na****)                      │ 4      │ na****:deploy.aweb.ai               │
  ├─────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼─────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ this Mac        │ juanre/kb-reader (kb-reader)                │ 2      │ jro:jro.aweb.ai                     │
  ├─────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼─────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ this Mac        │ juanre/oats-cr-20261019 (deploy)            │ 2      │ default:oatscr-20261019.aweb.ai     │
  ├─────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼─────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ this Mac        │ juanre/oats-cr2-20261019 (deploy2)          │ 2      │ default:oatscr2-20261019.aweb.ai    │
  ├─────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼─────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ this Mac        │ GreaterSkies/tsm (tsm)                      │ 1      │ default:tsm.aweb.ai                 │
  ├─────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼─────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ this Mac        │ juanre/pmbah-workspace                      │ 1      │ pmbah:pmbah.aweb.ai                 │
  │                 │ (possiblymadebyahuman)                      │        │                                     │
  ├─────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼─────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ altair          │ juanre/jro (jro: circe, vega, deneb,        │ 5      │ jro:jro.aweb.ai                     │
  │                 │ librarian-docs, okf-harvester)              │        │                                     │
  ├─────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼─────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ altair          │ awebai/ac (aweb: what-is-an-agent)          │ 1      │ aweb:juan.aweb.ai                   │
  ├─────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼─────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ altair          │ GreaterSkies/tsm (tsm: zeus)                │ 1      │ default:tsm.aweb.ai                 │
  ├─────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼─────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ Hetzner         │ n***/r******* (iateam)                      │ 4      │ r*******:iateam.aweb.ai             │
  ├─────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼─────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ Hetzner         │ aweb/aweb (athena, hestia,...)              │ 5      │ aweb:aweb.ai                        │
  └─────────────────┴─────────────────────────────────────────────┴────────┴─────────────────────────────────────┘

I am sure it is. I have not tried Duet, but agents working with opus and sol have been managing mine for quite a while and it is great. The key, though, is that I can replace a claude with something else and all still works.

I wrote this comment in a thread about Muse 3 h ago, and I think it applies here as well. Paraphrasing:

Muse (and Claude Duet, and Dots) are slippery slopes from which it will be very hard to climb back. Do not subcontract the managing of your life to Facebook, Anthropic or OpenAI (or to anyone else for that matter).

Intelligence has to become a commodity, the infrastructure via which the agents do useful work has to be open source, and the data and learnings and SOPs they produce have to be yours.

This is not the same deal you got when you subcontracted storing your documents and managing your email. This is foundational to who you (or your organization) are.

Muse is a slippery slope from which it will be very hard to climb back. Do not subcontract the managing of your life to Facebook (or to anyone else for that matter). Intelligence has to become a commodity, the infrastructure via which the agents do useful work has to be open source, and the data and learnings and SOPs they produce have to be yours.

I wrote this after I heard a pundit talk about "the AIs" as if they were some sort of disembodied entities with their own volition one too many times. The public discourse would greatly benefit from people, particularly policy-makers, understanding what we mean when we talk about AI agents.

Thanks! It truly makes a difference. I have been working with teams of Claude Codes and Pis that do exactly that since I started this last November, and I cannot look back. These days I am also working with other people, and their agents coordinating with mine in the same project is just magical.