After weeks of curiosity (and even some skepticism) about my "six-hour flight app build," I finally had a chance to document the process and the tools I use.
What started as a simple "how do you do this" request turned into something a bit more profound. Recording myself explaining the agentic stack forced me to confront a truth: We're not coding anymore. We're conducting.
My tech stack? Claude Flow, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Cursor, GitHub Codespaces, Neon, Railway, Doppler, Snyk, Trivy, CodeRabbit, Clerk, etc. But that's like saying a symphony is just instruments.
The real magic happens in the orchestration. Vision documents that become living touchstones. Product Requirements and Technical Architecture Docs that agents reference hundreds of times per build. Implementation plans that update themselves. Sprints & Phases with kickoff prompts, completion docs, and handoff protocols.
Each phase starts fresh. No context window exhaustion. No drift. Just clarity.
My canonical starting templates are designed to support GitHub Codespaces for virtual development (available from any machine at any time). They come pre-loaded with GitHub workflows that reinforce linters, security, code reviews, and more, and support out-of-the-box deployment pipelines for Docker, Azure, Railway, and more.
When it gets to swarms, it gets even more interesting. The swarms don't just execute what you tell them to do. They can debate among themselves. For example, you can ask three agents to tackle the same problem. A fourth synthesizes their approaches. It's ideation and peer review at machine speed.
The video walks through everything. The templates. The workflows. And why you should consider the Claude Flow framework from Reuven Cohen that enables true swarm intelligence.
But here's the uncomfortable truth: This isn't about the tools. It's about letting go.
Letting agents review each other's work. Letting workflows enforce standards, I might skip. Letting swarms find solutions I'd never consider.
After 25 years away from coding, I'm shipping software faster than ever. Not because I got better at programming. Because I learned to conduct instead of code.
This is where I stand today. But it's fluid and dynamic. As tools become available, I try to adopt them. And note that not all of these tools and frameworks may be suitable for you. Feel free to build your own orchestra.
But the future isn't about YOU writing better code. It's about you becoming a better conductor of an orchestra of agents who can research, design and code for you.
Carpe Agentem. 🎼
#AgenticDevelopment #SoftwareEngineering #AI #StartupLife #SyntheticLeverage
Mark Ruddock
Thoughts of an internationally experienced growth stage CEO and Board Member.
Thoughts of an internationally experienced growth stage CEO and Board Member
Mark Ruddock
Thoughts of an internationally experienced growth stage CEO and Board Member.
Experienced international CEO with three exits and over 20 years of experience at the helm of VC-backed technology and fintech startups. I've founded companies and come in as a later-stage CEO to help existing companies scale. My experience spans multi-country online financial services, mission-critical enterprise software and consumer-focused mobile applications.
Currently CEO of Kontent.ai, the industry's first CMS with native AI capabilities, kontent.ai helps the world's leading organizations generate an unparalleled return on their content by enabling them to create, manage, distribute, and optimize their content at scale with unprecedented speed oversight, and security.
Before that, I was CEO of Nuula (formerly known as BFS Capital), which Nav acquired. At Nuula, we believed there was a better way to help run your small business — so we built it. Nuula is a mobile application that gives small business owners instant access to critical business metrics and innovative financial products anytime, anywhere. It provides small business owners with the tools, content, and capital they need to be successful in a modern, competitive market.
Prior to that interim CEO of 4finance. Agreed to take on an interim role to help clarify strategy, accelerate the critical transformation of the business and set the company on a course for the next growth phase.
Before that, I was Managing Director, International at Wonga, responsible for overseeing all businesses outside of the UK, including consumer lending businesses in Canada, Spain, Poland and South Africa and our eCommerce and product financing business BillPay in Germany. Prior to that was CEO of Wonga Canada.
Prior to that, I was EO Viigo. When Viigo was acquired by Blackberry in 2010, the company had hundreds of partners, won numerous awards, including “PC Magazine’s Editors Choice“, the “Most Promising New Company of the Year” from the CNMA, and the “Wireless Leadership Award” from RIM, signed marquee enterprise customers such as Oppenheimer, UBS, BAT and Scotts and been downloaded over 3MM times, becoming one of the most popular BlackBerry apps of all time.
I started my career as the Founder and CEO of INEA. A software company that was a strategic partner to many of the world's leading financial institutions, INEA had deployments in over 44 countries. Backed by RBC, Ventures West, APAX and Edgestone, the company was acquired in June 2005 by Cartesis. Cartesis was subsequently acquired by Business Objects in 2007, which was later acquired by SAP.
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