We were just weeks away from crucial meetings with VCs, and had just sunset our main product. Fun times to be in.
The whole team sat down and put in some brain cycles. With every day that passed, a general sense of doom and lack of control was taking over. What could we go to market with close-to-zero engineering time, and absolutely no time to design and refine?
Sometimes, this is how we feel as founders
We decided to go for our agent farm, which we used internally to offload some work from our Atlas-like engineer figures. We are a small, in-person, fast-moving team. We don't use Linear, but many people do. And they may well be early adopters we so desperately need.
With engineering minutes, not hours, in the budget, we bet on a logical impossibility – pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. Let's use our agent farm to take a stab at it, we thought. I opened Github – sigh, it opened up on our open source popular repo – and created an issue. Pheu, that was faster than it took for us to write one idea on the whiteboard.
We noted down what our agent farm is currently capable of
After 5 minutes, the agent is done. We have a Linear account, but I never used it – I have no idea how to test it. Luckily, the agent left some notes. I follow their steps and, yep, it doesn't work. I just copy paste the error and give it another go. The anxiety worked up a hunger and it's lunch time, anyway.
The troll physics days were a good time, weren't they?
When I come back, I follow the steps, and... it still doesn't work, but I feel I am so close. I feel like I'm part of the impossible physics magnet car meme, but the car is actually inching on, slowly picking up speed. I prompt the agent again, this time with a smaller time budget because I wanna get to the bottom of it.
The troll seem more real today than they ever did
Ding! It's done. I open the PR with the same sense of trust I'd afford an engineer who is still moving their first steps and... they surprised me. It works. Linear integration is no longer something to decide on, it's just there. The car is moving – slowly – but it's not gonna stop. Problem?