A few months back a friend shared Steve Yegge’s Welcome to Gas Town post with our group and asked where everyone is. The post lays out a ladder for the AI coding process - eight stages, from “barely using it” to “running your own orchestrator.”

  • Stage 1: Zero or near-zero AI
  • Stage 2: Coding agent in the IDE, permissions on
  • Stage 3: Same agent, YOLO mode
  • Stage 4: Wide agent in the IDE - code is mostly diffs
  • Stage 5: CLI, single agent, YOLO
  • Stage 6: CLI, multi-agent, YOLO - three to five in parallel
  • Stage 7: Ten-plus agents, hand-managed
  • Stage 8: Building your own orchestrator

When my friend shared the original post, I was transitioning to Stage 6/7 so this post is a bit delayed because I wanted to share the state only when I’m comfortable where I’m at. For me each step was a process, way of working and ultimately a mindset leap.

Early 2025 I went from Stage 1 to Stage 2 quickly. Then I progressed to Stage 3-4 for months as the number of things that had to be done just grew and capacity didn’t, a natural forcing function to scale. The diffs replaced the code as the thing I was looking at but I wasn’t ready to stop reading lines (How could I stop reading the code!)

Now I’ve been living in Stage 6 and 7. Three to five agents in parallel is normal and anything less feels like I’m missing something 😅 . At this stage hand-management of these agents isn’t the problem - that part is fine. The exhausting part is evaluating output across that many threads, fast, all day and context switching fast. It can be more taxing than it seems.

I haven’t moved to Stage 8 though. I haven’t needed to. Over the last few months I’ve been loving Conductor, a Mac app that spawns workspaces and parallel agents cleanly, has handled the orchestration for me, works pretty well and doesn’t put my machine under duress.

In much of this evolution, what helped me become comfortable with this level of uncomfortable delegation was the years I spent managing engineers. Delegation and supervision - setting context, telling quickly whether output is on track, redirecting. Pleasantly happy that those skills transfer here.