Essays by Ry Walker

Agent companies are marathons you sprint through. Frameworks commoditize, monetization pins to infrastructure, and proximity to real builders is the moat.

The companies that try to skip to the grand AI vision will burn capital. The ones that start with one workflow per developer will compound their way into something much larger.

Executives, founders, engineering leaders. Each one needs a different mindset shift to operationalize agents in 2026 — and each one is currently running the wrong play.

Frontier labs want workflow quality to be a function of model quality, because that is what they sell. The contrarian bet is that customization beats probability.

If you upload your entire business to a frontier model provider, you have handed them the playbook. Keep context local. Use frontier models as the engine.

We are still early. The trajectory is clear. The companies that build platforms — not just use tools — define the next decade of software development.