Build reality-graded systems

There are only two positions in the 2026 labor market: principal of your own agents, or labor for someone else's. Jack Dorsey just ran the proof.

AI labs burn out their employees with civilization-scale competitive pressure. That burnout radiates outward — to developers, then educators, then anyone whose tools keep shifting every 90 days. The release cadence is the stress wave. Everyone downstream absorbs it.

Everything we know about management theory exists because humans are emotionally expensive to coordinate. Strip that layer out and what remains is a clean systems problem. Running seven AI agents taught me why management practices exist — not just that they do.

We tried to add video to a brand-new voice-note podcast. The laptop overheated, OBS hung, life intervened — and the failure mode was the lesson. Reality doesn’t say ‘no’. It rate-limits you until your pipeline matches your ambition.

I recorded a voice note while cooking dinner, describing a feature I wanted. By the time the onions were done, the feature existed — as the blog post itself. A builder's honest account of two weeks running an AI orchestrator, the maddening overhead of making it work, and why the compound returns are worth it.