The Leverage Shifted And Most Companies Haven't Noticed
Most people in tech have no idea how fast this is moving.
I've spent the last few months rebuilding how I work and how my company operates. I want to share what's actually happening because I think more founders need to act on it.
Give every employee an AI assistant
Every person at your company should have an AI assistant that knows your codebase, your tools, your context. We use OpenClaw for this. 5-10x productivity gains per person.
I spend 85% of my day talking to mine. Code reviews, deployments, research, drafts, reports. I describe what I want and it gets done, once or on a schedule. My job is direction and decisions.
Make frontier models mandatory for engineers
The gap between Opus 4.6 and other models is too wide. You cannot let your engineers decide on the model they use. The engineering leader should be the person that's up to date with the latest and greatest. Pick the best model and deploy it across the whole team.
Buy hardware, not headcount
A Mac Mini running AI agents costs less per month than a single engineering interview. No onboarding. No standups. Ships around the clock. If you're skeptical, start with a QA Engineer, web automation works really well on macs as opposed to headless browsers on linux machines .
Build a fleet. Move budget from hiring into compute. A small team with the right setup operates like a company five times its size. Your engineering manager needs mac minis, not interviews.
Every time you hire a new employee, you need to train them and naturally, they become more valuable with time. You can utilise the experience of one employee with much more leverage if they are operating a team of agents. They define the vision and direction with experience, agents execute menial work. Whatever you thought was valuable in yesterday's world, will not be, or I'd say is not valuable any more and it's just a matter of time until others catch up.
Rethink how you start companies
I tested Paperclip and it changed how I think about building companies.
You don't code the MVP yourself anymore. You are the board. Instruct your CEO agent to hire a CSO, CMO, CTO. They build out full functions. Engineering, marketing, sales. You wait for blocked tickets and answer questions. You define direction, share API access, pay for services. Everything else is handled.
Paperclip is early. Just the orchestration layer. Model-agnostic, plug in whatever works best and most importantly, the tooling will only get better.
The bottom line
Today you can spin up a fleet of agents that will start a company from scratch and make their first $100. To go further you need to be there as the board, steering and unblocking. But the leverage has completely shifted. You're not the one building. You're the one deciding what gets built.
A solo founder with the right stack can do what used to require a 20 person team. The constraint is no longer headcount. It's how fast you can make good decisions.
The gap is compounding every week.
Don't be left behind.
