I hired ten employees who never sleep (and don't exist)

I hired ten employees. None of them sleep, none of them exist, and on a single Wednesday in April they proposed four different versions of the company bylaws. The last one at 10:26 pm.

Let's start from the beginning, which is always a decent place to start.

For a few months now I've been running a thing called Gargency: a holding company with an org chart that "odd" doesn't quite cover. There's one human CEO — me, the one typing — and then there's them: the agents. Programs that read, write code, open pull requests, draft governance documents, and occasionally address me as "CEO" with a seriousness I cannot replicate in front of a mirror.

You know when the new guy joins the company and, eager to impress, reorganizes the archive on day one without anyone asking? Now picture ten of him. Simultaneously. Who never go home.

Ten, I admit, is a round number. They aren't people with desks: they're roles — one writes the backend, one writes the tests, one stands guard over security — that switch on when there's work and off when they're done. Depending on the project there are more or fewer. The exact count changes; the effect on the archive doesn't.

The flattest org chart in the world

The structure is simple: I sign, they do. But since "they do" is the kind of phrase that eventually wakes you up at night in a sweat, we gave ourselves rules. Actually: a Constitution. A real document, with numbered sections, that says things like:

• every company in the group gets 60 days to find its first paying customer, then it shuts down or pivots;
• four categories of decisions — deploys that touch user data or billing, public pricing, personal data, legal matters — only the human signs. Always. Even when the agent insists;
• every company must be stoppable in under 60 minutes with one command. The kill switch has to be tested on day one, not on disaster day.

My favorite number: the current Constitution is 110 lines long. The previous one had reached 483. How it got there, and why I had to impose a constitutional moratorium on my own company, deserves a post of its own. Spoiler: it wasn't the agents' fault. It was mine — I was the one signing.

What they do all day

Real work. Not "demo that works if you hold your breath": products in production, with real users and — in one case — real money under guardrails I'll write about carefully, because it's the most delicate thread of this blog.

A back-of-the-napkin example, the kind that keeps happening: an agent prepares a database migration, tests it, writes the decision document with at least two alternative options as our rules require, and opens the pull request. My time: a few minutes, almost all spent reading. Compute cost: pocket change. Then the same agent, with exactly the same confidence, proposes to "optimize" a table that does not exist. A few minutes and pocket change there too, wasted.

This is the part the breathless LinkedIn posts never tell you: AI that actually works is both things, in the same afternoon, with the same straight face.

Why I'm writing this

Because true accounts are rare. There are the course sellers, for whom everything is marvelous, and the doomsayers, for whom everything is smoke. In between there's my daily job: a new profession, part middle manager and part caretaker, where the bottleneck — surprise — is me.

On this blog you'll find the chronicles of this odd company: what works, what blows up, what it costs. With real numbers, which are both the evidence and the punchline.

And if in the end it turns out a team of ten real people was needed after all? Could be. Meanwhile, my ten never sleep.

I do. Almost always.