How I build
These days, agents write most of my code. I plan and check the work, and I decide what ships. I rebuilt DepthChartIQ this way, from its founder's prototype to a production app with billing, in about nine weeks.
How a change ships
- I write the plan first. It says what the change should do and how I'll know it works.
- Agents write the code on a branch.
- Checks run on the pull request before I look at it. At TradeCanny, that includes a fixed set of coaching test cases.
- A second model reviews the change and looks for ways to break it.
- I read the plan, the checks and the review, and I decide what ships.
Status pages
I've started giving the people I build for a live status page. It shows what's live, what's being built and what's coming next. It updates itself from the running system every two hours, so nobody has to ask me where the build is.
Here's the whole page for Jocasa, a real-time analytics and quant platform on Robinhood Chain that I started building in September.
Setting up teams to ship
I set up each codebase so other people can ship on it. The Vers1ons engineers share a set of agent skills, the written instructions their coding agents follow for jobs like shipping a change. I wrote most of them, and they've written their own too, including the rulebook for the design system and a skill for splitting royalties. One of the engineers built the preview environments: any branch gets one from a Slack command, and it deletes itself after a day.
In DepthChartIQ's first week, I wrote a skill that sets up a new teammate's laptop. It asks before it installs anything and explains what each tool is for as it goes.
Who ships the code now →Who owns the code
Vers1ons, DepthChartIQ and FlipSmart each keep their code in their own GitHub organization, so I describe my part instead of linking it.