After ten months of building with AI agents, I crossed a milestone over the weekend: $18 million in equivalent developer output. That's over 150 person-years of development. But it was the swarms that delivered almost as much functioning software in the past two months as we had collectively delivered over the eight prior months.
But here's what the headlines miss about agent swarms.
While it's right to celebrate the economics and reflect on the exciting productivity metrics, what the headlines don't tell you is how fundamentally different swarm development feels.
Traditional coding is linear. You write, you debug, you deploy. One thread of consciousness attacking one problem at a time.
Swarm development is orchestral. Right now, thanks to Claude Code and the Claude Flow hive framework from Reuven Cohen, I have 12 agents working in parallel: • 3 refactoring our LLM observability platform • 4 building new features for a new Breakfast with AI app • 2 writing documentation • 3 running security audits before the code is approved for release.
They're not just following instructions. They're "reasoning", debating, and course-correcting. One agent identifies a performance bottleneck, alerts another, and then spins up a third to benchmark alternatives.
The cognitive load shift is profound. I've gone from writing code to conducting symphonies (or sports teams).
But here's the part that keeps me up at night: We're not even close to the ceiling. We're still battling with some serious limitations:
🧠 Limited context windows (even at 200k tokens)
🔄 Not quite getting it right the first time
💰 Compute costs at scale
🎯 Focus drift in complex, long-running tasks
We're solving these systematically. New orchestration frameworks. Better memory systems. Smarter agent hierarchies.
The next milestone? $100M in output by year-end. Not because I'm chasing numbers, but because each breakthrough unlocks new possibilities.
Three months ago, a board member asked me: "Why do we need 150 developers?". It was a good question.
Today, the question isn't whether agent swarms will transform software development. The question is whether you will be conducting the orchestra or watching from the sidelines.
To my fellow technical founders: If you haven't experienced swarm development yet, expose yourself to it fast. This isn't the future of coding anymore. It's Tuesday afternoon in my home office.
Welcome to the age of synthetic leverage.
Carpe Agentem.
#AI #AgenticDevelopment #SoftwareEngineering #FutureOfWork #Innovation
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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