“Follow your energy.”

This might be one of the most radical ideas about how to run an AI-native company I’ve heard at @aiDotEngineer .

Quinn Slack @sqs, founder of Amp and Sourcegraph (but not Slack haha) just explained how they reinvented the company around AI agents, with 21 employees competing against companies with hundreds or thousands.

They didn’t initially choose to stay small! They literally couldn’t hire for almost a year because of the legal spinoff process.

Ouch. But!

What looked like a terrible constraint turned into their biggest advantage.

Here’s what they figured out:

1. One meeting a week. The guidance for everyone else is simply: follow your energy. Quinn says to trust and be surprised.

2. No PMs. No Jira. No traditional support system. Everything happens in Amp agent threads. Everyone talks to customers. Everyone can build. Love it

3. Job titles barely matter anymore. An SDR, two years out of college, decides customers need ACH payments and builds the system himself. No waiting for engineering resources or next quarter’s roadmap.

4. Ship constantly, but in tiny pieces. That’s crucial. Let agents add logging, deploy, monitor the results, and make the next change. Quinn argues this can actually be safer than giant PRs and slow release cycles.

5. Turn customer support into an engineering superpower. Someone reports a bug. An agent helps fix it, finds everyone else affected in the logs, and proactively sends apologies and free credits. How many companies do THAT? OpenAI, I’m looking at you.

6. Build your own software. Why pay for Salesforce when you use 2% of its features? Build exactly the 2% you need, plus the integrations you always wished existed.

7. Give everyone real ownership. With 21 people sharing the upside, people start thinking about the whole company rather than protecting their little corner of an org chart. Skin in the game!!!

So maybe the biggest change AI brings to software isn’t how we write code.

It’s how we organize people.

And maybe the most productive thing you can tell them is simply:

Follow your energy. And get out of the cage.

Fascinating talk.