We are all grappling with what it means to be an organization with agentic tools. We are seeing a Cambrian explosion of workflows in how to produce software. It is unwise, right now, to declare The Solution and enforce it. Developer Productivity teams that are pushing a workflow on their users are being counterproductive. Instead, the moment calls for experimentation and for giving people the agency to experiment, to learn, to iterate.

The key is the compute primitive. You–and everyone else on your team–need to have plentiful, performant, trivial-to-provision VMs that can be accessed from your phone or anywhere, that can be shared securely, that integrate nicely, and that can be trusted with your data. Given this, you'll find an explosion of agents, automations, UIs, workflows, notifications, bots, claws, and so on. The successful ones will evolve to be the bones of your software factory.

This is not a One Size Fits All moment. This is an Everyone's Workflow is Different moment.

We went around the office recently, and talked through our workflows. 7 people. 9 workflows. (Not a joke!) Everyone's are different. Everyone's are wonderful. There's the newsletter that visits our Slack and tells us what's going on in support rotation. There's the integration with our Clickhouse logs. There's the background agent fighting the noble fight against test flakes. There are multi-agent orchestrators. There's an "inbox" view that gathers agent conversation state from all the VMs and sorts them by recency and annotates whether they've been pushed. There's vanilla Claude Code. There's the pi coding agent. There's our own coding agent, Shelley.

The only common denominator? We're all using VMs to isolate, try, share, iterate, parallelize. So many VMs.