I Got Promoted Away From the Keyboard

30 pull requests last week.

52 in the past two weeks. 104 last month. 421 since I pivoted Attrove in January.

I am a solo founder.

That is a strange sentence to write. For most of my career, a week like that would have meant I was doing the wrong job.

I spent 14 years at Apple, and the ladder worked the way the ladder is supposed to work: start as an individual contributor (IC), get good, and take on more. Help others get good. Manage a team. Then a bigger team. Eventually you have more scope, more headcount, more leverage on paper, and less time touching the thing.

I do not mean that as a complaint. Apple was about the best possible version of that path and I loved it.

The managers around me were technical. Most had been strong ICs before they managed. They could go deep when needed, and in a hardware org that matters. Factory issues, wireless problems, test automation, strange failures that only appear at 2 a.m. on a line in China. The technical muscles stayed useful.

The calendar ultimately eats the keyboard.

Email in the morning. Meetings during the day. WebEx at night with the factories. Hiring. Planning. Reviews. Escalations. Headcount. Roadmaps. Pre-reads. Post-reads.

The team’s success was my success, which is true. It is also a polite way of saying I gradually stopped shipping anything myself.

I missed building more than I realized.

The New Middle

There is a clean story floating around right now: AI is gutting the middle:

• Layoffs

• Flattened orgs

• Managers cut

• Everyone is an IC now

You can see why the story travels. Gartner has even put a number on it, predicting that through 2026, 20% of organizations will use AI to flatten their org structures and eliminate more than half of current middle-management positions.

That sounds dramatic because it is.

But the story is still too clean.

The work that middle layers did is not gone. Someone still has to decide what matters. Someone still has to break vague work into executable pieces. Someone still has to set standards, resolve ambiguity, notice drift, and know when done is actually done.

What changed is where coordination can live. For decades, work could not flow cleanly without people whose job was making sure other people were pointed in the right direction. A meaningful slice of that work can now be run by one high-agency person with the right stack.

The work is compressing into a smaller number of people who know how to run the loop.

Leaving the Badge

Leaving Apple and starting Attrove turned me back into an IC overnight: codebase, customer calls, infrastructure, sales motion, the boring connective tissue nobody sees. It was a shock. It was also the most energizing thing I have done in years.

The tools changed while I was away.

In early 2024, AI could help write a function if you already knew exactly what you wanted. By early 2025, it could draft a feature with enough scaffolding. Today I can give an agent a goal, let it work for hours, and wake up to a pull request asking for review.

It feels like magic. Some of the output is bad. Some is close but wrong. Some needs a heavier hand than it should. I still need to know the product, the architecture, the customer, the edge cases, and the smell of a bad abstraction (or God forbid Claude’s design style).

But the floor moved.

Google has said nearly half of its new code is now generated by AI and then reviewed and accepted by engineers. DORA’s 2025 report found AI adoption among software development professionals had reached 90%, with more than 80% saying AI improved their productivity.

That tracks with my own tiny, strange sample size.

Last week, nearly all of my 30 Pull Request (PRs) were drafted by autonomous agents and reviewed by me. Agents ran doc audits. They cleaned up old routes. They checked that public docs matched the actual API. They handled work that previously would have eaten half a Tuesday, and then I reviewed the result with the skepticism of someone who has been burned enough times to earn it.

This is the actual shape of early-stage in 2026.

One founder. A bench of agents. A few trusted humans on the edges. A lot of review.

Managing Agents Feels Weirdly Familiar

The funny part is that my Apple management skills are more useful now than my old technical muscle memory.

The coding came back. The management never left.

Delegation. Task breakdown. Role definition. Clear inputs. Clear outputs. Completion criteria. Knowing when to give context and when to constrain scope. Knowing which work should be done by which “person,” even when the person is now an agent running in a terminal.

Bad managers create vague work for humans.

Bad agent prompts create vague work for models and a massive token bill.

Same failure mode, different costume.

The best results come when I treat the agent like a capable junior engineer: needs context, guardrails, scoped work, review, and to be told which tradeoffs matter before it makes them badly.

That is management, at its core. The real version.

The version where you make work executable.

Everyone is Becoming a Player-coach

I do not think every manager needs to become a full-time IC again. Some leaders operate at a scale where their highest-leverage work is still purely organizational. Some people are great at building systems of humans, and we should not pretend agents replace judgment, trust, mentorship, or culture.

But a lot of leaders are about to face an uncomfortable question:

Can you still do the work close enough to direct it well?

The leaders who can pick up the tools, re-enter the work, and run agent teams will have a kind of leverage that did not exist eighteen months ago. The leaders who cannot may still be valuable, but their value will be tested more directly.

The old buffer is shrinking.

The “middle is being gutted” narrative misses this. The middle is being absorbed: by people who combine taste, judgment, technical fluency, and agency into one operating loop.

An effective IC is becoming a manager of agents.

An effective manager who can ship again is becoming something else entirely.

A player-coach with a compiler.

This is Lonely. And Great.

At Apple, the work was surrounded by people. Too many people sometimes, but people. Hallway conversations, factory calls, team debates, design reviews, arguments over edge cases, the shared pain of trying to get a thing across the line.

Solo founder life does not have the same vibe.

There is no team room buzzing because the build finally passed. No engineer swinging by your desk with a weird bug. No manager walking in with one more “quick thing” that is never quick.

Now it is me, a terminal, a repo, a handful of agents, and a queue of PRs.

It is quieter. Sometimes too quiet.

And I have not enjoyed the work this much in a decade.

I am closer to the product. Closer to customers. Closer to the code. Closer to the consequences of every decision. I can feel the loop again: talk to a user, see the shape of the problem, ship something, learn, tighten, repeat.

I have not been this productive since I was 29.

What took months and a team of twenty can be done by a couple people and a terminal now.

That sentence still feels ridiculous. It is also true.

The Open Door

If you are a leader at a big company and your fingers are starting to itch, pay attention to that feeling.

Maybe you do not want to code again. Maybe your lane is ops, finance, support, product, legal, sales, or some weird internal system only three people understand. Fine. Not everyone has to become a software engineer.

The point is that the distance between “I know what should happen” and “I can make it happen” is collapsing.

That is the part worth taking seriously.

The next version of work will be defined by the people who get close enough to the work to feel where the tools actually help, where they fail, and where the old org chart was doing more coordination than creation.

If you have been promoted away from the work and quietly miss it, this is a weirdly good time to come back.

My DMs are open. I am collecting these stories.

What is one thing your old team used to do that you can now do alone, or wish you could?

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