AI may have created the 10x engineer, but software is still built by teams. When product, design, engineering, QA, and agents operate across fragmented workflows, faster code only builds the wrong thing faster. The real unlock is multiplayer agentic software delivery, where customer and business intent survives all the way to production.
I've been building professional software for about eight years now. I've led teams I had no right leading. They had far more experience than I did. But being a startup CTO teaches you to get out of your comfort zone faster than you could ever have hoped.
The job goes from writing all the code to, frankly, managing people and processes. It becomes your responsibility to maintain technical direction and own the how within the software development lifecycle. You have to ensure the software can continue to grow, developers can operate confidently in the codebase, and deeper technical considerations like architecture, scale, concurrency, and testing remain coherent and have direction.
No matter the specifics of the implementation, the goal is simple: deliver software that fulfils the business's promise and intent to its customers.
Which naturally means there is more to building software than engineering. Leadership brings business context, product owns what is needed and why, design shapes the UI and UX, security brings compliance requirements, and QA tests whether quality has been maintained.
Building production software is ultimately not a one-man game.
All the AI hype has blurred this reality and given us the illusion that we can release production software over a weekend. The reality is that code has become cheaper to generate, but software delivery is still hard.
As a solo founder building today, I have access to leverage I could only have dreamed of at my last startup. I've been able to do things on my own that would previously have cost tens of thousands of dollars. I've also been building with AI for the better part of two years now, all the way back to when we were still manually copying code from ChatGPT.
I've gone from rudimentary prompts to having a full harness where four or five agents are churning out production software, running tests, and opening PRs simultaneously.
However, despite this velocity, the hype starts to fade pretty quickly. Speed comes with slop. As the number of PRs increases, so do the bugs, incidents, and the difficulty of understanding what the hell is happening in the codebase.
But all of this is still only one part of the software delivery pipeline: engineering, and more specifically, code generation.
In system design, we learn that over-optimizing one part of a system simply moves the bottleneck to everything around it. That is what we are experiencing now.
Code generation has become inexpensive. When code was slow and expensive, it created natural friction. We had time to debate implementation and architecture, share knowledge, let product refine the intent, and give QA time to prepare for how the work would be tested.
We built rituals and ceremonies like sprints, stand-ups, and grooming sessions, all to keep each other aligned and ultimately ensure we were building the right thing.
Some of these still have their rightful place, but others need to be redesigned and modernized. With agents, we are shipping faster than ever before, but those gains are being eroded because our delivery systems cannot keep up.
We need to look beyond optimizing engineering and look at the whole pipeline, because software delivery still runs across fragmented tools, people, and processes.
In a process governed by multiple actors working towards fulfilling the business's needs and promises to its customers, that fragmentation has consequences.
Handoffs lose fidelity. Decisions detach from intent. Implementations drift from what customers need. Every mismatch costs teams rework, trust, and delivery confidence.
The solution, I believe, is that agentic software delivery has to become multiplayer, with business, product, design, engineering, QA, and agents all collaboratively contributing to building software.
Why?
Because building with AI depends on context.
Code repository context is only step one. It may be sufficient when you are building alone. Spread agentic development across 10 to 20 developers, PMs, designers, architects, and business stakeholders, and code context becomes the least of your problems.
What now needs to survive is business and customer intent.
That intent has to travel through business, product, design, and engineering before eventually making its way into a Jira ticket that gets handed to Claude or Codex. By that stage, it has already been heavily compressed.
The organization's shared context, including the tribal knowledge and reasoning debated upstream, rarely makes it into the ticket, leaving the agent under-informed.
Yes, it will give you code. But because that code is detached from the upstream reasoning, rework grows and all sorts of drift surface during PR review, after thousands of lines of code have already been produced.
Multiplayer agentic software delivery isn't just about everyone working together. It is about moving beyond the individual 10x AI-pilled engineer towards a whole team building software with agents.
It means business and customer intent surviving every translation layer, from requirements to prototypes, technical designs, work items, implementation, tests, and finally feedback, all within one connected system.
It means giving agents the upstream reasoning from product, design, and engineering. It means giving teams shared context, coordinated workflows, and organizational learning.
When that happens, AI ROI stops being an individual story and becomes a team outcome.
And that's the future we're building for.
