Essays by Ry Walker

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

all agents ai apis architecture

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 2, 2026	The Zero-Stickiness Problem at the Tool Layer Customers spend six months configuring a coding agent and ditch it overnight when something better ships. If your value proposition lives at the tool layer, you are one leapfrog from irrelevance.
May 1, 2026	The Orchestration Bet Most companies are betting on building the best agent. A smaller number are betting that the best agent changes every week — and that the durable value is in orchestration.
Apr 30, 2026	Agents Are Software, and Software Needs a Factory People talk about agent harnesses as if the harness is the interesting part. It is not. The interesting part is the factory — sandboxing, orchestration, persistence, model translation.