Essays by Ry Walker

Essays on AI, startups, and software engineering by Ry Walker, founder of Tembo and Astronomer.

astronomer automation bottleneck build-vs-buy business-model code-review coding-agents communication competition context context-engineering coordination culture customer-development customer-success data decision-making developer-experience developer-tools devex economics engineering enterprise evaluation experience founders fundraising future go-to-market governance growth gtm human-in-the-loop incentives infrastructure integration intuition judgment knowledge-management knowledge-work kubernetes leadership learning maintenance management market marketing measurement memory moats nuance observability open-source operationalization operations outbound personal personal-agents personalization phases pitching platform platforms playbook process procurement product prototyping quality rag reasoning recommendations retention review sales security seed shipping skills software-engineering startups storytelling strategy

tembo tooling trust unit-economics workflow

May 4, 2026	Agents in Production: GTM Mesh and the Death of the ERP The same mesh-of-agents pattern that closes the gap between ad click and revenue is the one that retires the ERP dashboard. Two examples, one architecture.
May 2, 2026	The Pilot Is the Product Do not wait for perfection. Pilot with three or four users. Let them complain. Their complaints are the backlog. The pilot is not a test — it is the first iteration of the production system.
Apr 29, 2026	The ERP Is Dead. The Agent Is Your Operating System Now The ERP was supposed to solve the toggling-between-six-tools problem. It did not. The agent does — by becoming the operating layer on top of every system you already paid for.
Apr 29, 2026	The Primitives Are the Same Across Roles Sandbox, tools, prompts, governance — the primitives are universal. Engineering agents and GTM agents share the same engine. Only the body changes.
Apr 28, 2026	One Human Will Supervise Hundreds of Agents A manager handles seven direct reports. A supervisor will handle hundreds of agents — but only if observability and review are good enough to make oversight scale.
Apr 24, 2026	Non-Determinism Demands Human Correction Loops Agents are non-deterministic by nature. The way they get smart is through human correction at scale, and the atomic mesh is what makes that tractable.
Apr 21, 2026	Two Maintenance Curves: Infrastructure Decreases, Context Never Stops The maintenance burden of running agents is not one thing. It splits into two categories with opposite cost curves, and only one of them ever ends.