I Don't Want to Be a 10-Person Team of One
I've been the bridge. Between strategy and code, between design and delivery. It's exhausting. And lately I've been wondering if exhausting is the same thing as valuable.
Nino Chavez
Principal Consultant & Enterprise Architect
I’ve been the bridge. Between strategy and code, between design and delivery, between what the client says they want and what they actually need.
It’s exhausting. And lately I’ve been wondering if exhausting is the same thing as valuable.
The Pattern I Can’t Unsee
There’s maybe five or ten people across my entire company who can have the conversation I want to have about agentic commerce. Not the buzzword version. The real one—spanning strategy, product, engineering, delivery, staffing, learning.
I’m one of them.
That’s not a flex. It’s a structural problem.
When you’re the only node connecting clusters that don’t talk to each other, you become necessary to the project—and invisible to the org chart. There’s no box for “person who makes everyone else understand each other.”
The Math
For the past six months, I’ve been using AI coding agents to build Rally HQ, AIX, CIX—full SaaS platforms with multi-tenant architecture, real-time features, the works. They’re experiments, not businesses. But they’re built to production standards, not weekend hacks.
The point isn’t that they’re making money. The point is what it took to build them: one person, AI agents, weeks instead of months.
I thought that made me well-positioned. The math says otherwise.
Product company: Collapse timelines = reduced cost = leverage.
Consultancy: Collapse timelines = smaller engagement = problem.
I’ve been selling throughput to a buyer who purchases hours. Optimizing for velocity in a system that monetizes duration.
The Part I Didn’t Want to See
My peers who optimize for meetings, alignment, and extended timelines? They’re not doing it wrong. They’re reading the room correctly.
The room rewards presence, not velocity.
I’ve been building zero-to-one products on weekends, writing white papers nobody asked for, creating frameworks that collapse the gap between strategy and code. Wondering why it wasn’t “landing.”
It wasn’t landing because I was playing the wrong game.
Jerry Maguire, 3am
There’s a scene where he writes a 25-page manifesto. He calls it “The Things We Think and Do Not Say.”
His thesis: Fewer clients. Less money. More attention.
Everyone at the agency applauded. Then they fired him.
His mistake wasn’t the manifesto. It was thinking he could reform the system from inside. He had to leave, take one client, and start over.
I don’t need to start an agency. But I’m realizing I need to find a different room. Not because I’m above this one. Because this one is built for a game I don’t want to play.
What I’m Looking For
Here’s what I didn’t want to admit: I’ve been lonely.
I don’t want to be the only person in the room who thinks this way. I want to be in a room where this is just normal.
Where using AI to ship production systems in a week isn’t unusual. Where the question isn’t “Why did you build it yourself?” but “Which model did you use?”
Where I have peers. Not people I’m constantly translating for.
Replit. Cursor. Anthropic. Vercel. Stripe. Shopify.
I don’t know if those are the exact places. But they’re the shape of what I’m looking for. Talent-dense environments where AI-native velocity is baseline, not exceptional.
What I’m Watching
Vertical over horizontal.
The “smart generalist” who can do a bit of everything? That’s exactly what AI replaces most easily. Generic strategy. Generic code. Generic analysis. AI handles horizontal breadth at scale now.
What it can’t replicate: deep vertical expertise. “AI for Bio-Pharma Supply Chains.” “Agentic workflows for media rights management.” “Commerce platform architecture for complex B2B distribution.”
That specificity is the new hard work. Not grinding hours—Charley Munger hard work. The compounding kind. Years of pattern recognition in a domain narrow enough to own, deep enough to matter.
The rooms I’m looking for aren’t staffed with generalists who use AI. They’re staffed with vertical experts who direct it.
The Direction
Structurally misaligned. That’s the phrase that keeps surfacing.
Not undervalued. Not unappreciated. Just… in the wrong room.
Jerry’s manifesto was about caring more. Mine is simpler:
Fewer hours. Higher velocity. Better outcome.
That’s not a reform proposal. It’s just how some rooms already operate.
I’m done being a one-person bridge. Time to find a team that already speaks the same language.