Thesis
Attention is all you need.
In 2017 that was about models. Now it's about you.
The models got good. They write the feature, fix the build, answer the review. The bottleneck moved.
It's you.
Watch yourself for a day
A ticket lands. You paste it into Claude: “fix this.” Someone in Slack asks why checkout is slow. You ask an agent, then paste the answer back. Datadog lights up. You paste the stack trace.
You didn't do the work. You carried a message.
You were a meat proxy.
And the loop stops whenever you do: asleep, in a meeting, or just busy.
A prompt runs once. A loop keeps running.
At 2am an agent finds a bug and files it. Another opens the fix. A different model tears it apart. You wake up to it merged.
Set it up once. Then get out of the way.
So build the thing that builds it.
The software factory that powers your software factory.
How to build it
- Watch what comes in. Tickets, alerts, questions, red builds. Each one is a trigger.
- Watch what piles up. Open PRs, flaky tests, unanswered threads. Every pile is a missing loop.
- Close the loop. When this happens, an agent does that. Nobody in the middle.
- Chain the loops. The hunter feeds the fixer. The fixer feeds the reviewer.
- Fix the machine, not the part. Same problem twice? Don't fix it again. Build the loop that does.
Your attention is the scarcest thing in the system. Spend it on purpose.