My Constitution reached version 8 in thirty days

There is a precise moment when I realized things had gotten out of hand: when I read, in my own company's changelog, that the Constitution had reached version 8 in thirty days. Eight versions. Thirty days. Zero customers.

The Philadelphia Convention took four months to write one. We were shipping one almost every four days — four on a single day, 22 April — and the only difference is that they went on to found the United States, while we hadn't yet invoiced a single euro.

How you get to eight

You get to eight one step at a time, which is how you get everywhere — except I usually say that as a compliment.

It worked like this. An agent would finish a project and write the post-mortem, most diligently. From the post-mortem it extracted "patterns". From the patterns it proposed "constitutional amendments". And I — here's the good part — signed. Because every single amendment, read on its own, was reasonable. A section on the format of decision documents: reasonable. An AUTO/ASK/ESCALATE autonomy matrix: reasonable. A portfolio funnel section, with twelve-month targets and quarterly reviews: exceedingly reasonable.

Result: 483 lines of fundamental law for a company consisting of one person and a variable number of processes. We had constitutionalized volatile metrics. We had an agentic board of directors — a CFO, a CSO and a CRO — that by statute met monthly and that, in black and white, had even ratified the Constitution. Minor detail: none of the three agents had ever been switched on. In the evenings, instead of building product, I practiced constitutional law.

Moratorium day

The diagnosis has a name I like too much not to use: governance runaway. Governance rolling away like a shopping cart on a slope.

The cure was humiliating in its simplicity. I wrote (fine: we wrote — an agent held the pen) a decision document imposing a constitutional moratorium: no new versions for three months, except for security emergencies or legal obligations. Then we went on a diet: from the 483-line version to a 110-line v2.1-slim. Only the invariants stayed: the 60-day first-customer clock, the four signatures that remain human, the kill switch, the auditable log, portfolio discipline. Everything else — procedures, templates, best practices — was demoted to "doctrine": documents you can change without a ceremony.

The before-and-after numbers, because numbers don't lie and I do:

• Lines of Constitution: 483 → 110
• Versions in 30 days: 8 → 0 (moratorium)
• Paying customers during the constitutional era: 0
• CEO hours per week spent on governance: never measured. Probably for the best

The lesson (the real one)

It would be convenient to close with "agents overdo it, keep an eye on them". But the bottleneck wasn't them: it was me. The agents proposed; I signed. I signed because saying yes to a well-written document delivers the same satisfaction as having worked, at the price of not having worked at all.

The rule I took home is a single one: every new process must pay its own rent. If a rule doesn't prevent a concrete harm that has already happened at least once, it doesn't enter the Constitution. At most it enters a note, where rules go to die in peace.

And version 9? Not before August. There's a moratorium, and this time the signature means something.

Signed by me, of course. It's the only thing around here I still sign gladly.