Two thirds of the spend bought nothing
An amplifier that does not choose what it amplifies, a loop that spent two thirds of its budget moving nothing, a portable format for the instructions you write, and a quality bar that is now the pipeline.
How we organise
John Cutler’s twenty operating takes
The take on AI is that it amplifies bad habits and good ones alike, so a firm running a feature factory gets a better feature factory. The take sits inside a list of twenty rather than above it.
We tell a client that an amplifier does not choose what it amplifies. An operating review should ask what this firm is good and bad at, since both get multiplied. Nobody has written the second half down.
How we build
A loop converges only with a target, an observable state, local changes and a stopping rule. The verifier is where loops fail. Capped at 89 by artificial latency, one loop spent $1.40 reaching that and $2.84 more buying nothing.
Our position is that a loop with no stopping rule is a subscription. Neither the loop nor the person running it knew until afterwards, and the missing instrument is progress per pound, visible while the loop runs.
A portable format for agent plugins
An open format packages skills and server configuration in one directory that several clients can load, and each component validates separately, so a broken one does not disable the rest. Six vendors sit behind it, and version 1 carries those two types.
We judge a format by what a firm keeps when it changes client. Skills hold what your people worked out about how work is done here, and typed into a vendor’s console they get rewritten on the way out.
How we assure
Addy Osmani on quality when an agent writes the code
Quality now rests on the constraints around the agent: tests, mutation testing, complexity metrics, type checks, security scanning, linted architecture rules. Ordinary things, mostly installed. They belong early in the pipeline, not at the end.
We ask a client to count what runs automatically before anyone sees agent output. Review capacity is fixed; generation capacity is not. The bar is no longer what reviewers know. It is what the pipeline enforces.