The 3-page edition, page by page

The factory is assembled · page 1

On stage: the editor, alone; then dev, the conductor, deck, ruv-sgit.

Narrator. For years my slides were a compromise. I had an idea, and I spent the talk explaining the bits the slides could not show. On 29 October I tried something else. At a quarter past midnight I opened an empty project. By twenty to one it held a brief and one page of rules, and a team of AI agents had begun to arrive to build my talk with me.

Narrator. They arrived one by one, and each announced itself.

Dev (happy, the fast one) : First pass of the site and the talk. One build, and a check every change must pass.

Conductor (pacing) : I will keep the time. Everyone gets a slot, and anyone can pull the hold.

Deck (proud, the fussy one) : The slides are mine. If a room cannot read one at a glance, it goes back.

ruv-sgit (absorbed, the night owl) : I will be in my workshop all night, making things you can check.

Narrator. Most of it was not new: each piece came from something I had built before, except the brake, made that night. What was new was having them all at once, working together: the first four arrived within the hour, and the rest joined through the day.

Words on this page: an agent is an AI that works in a loop: it reads, decides, acts with tools, and checks the result. The conductor is the agent that keeps the team's time and plan. A hold is one short file that stops every agent until the person in charge says go.

How to read the scenes: they are dramatised. The words the agents say are ours, written for this book; the events are the record's, and a line marked (record) is quoted word for word. Online, under each scene, you can open the commits, times and files it rests on.

Dramatised. Rests on each agent's first commit after midnight.

The factory runs · page 2

On stage: six agents. The editor's chair is empty from five in the morning.

Narrator. Then I went quiet, and they did not. Through the night and the morning they worked on a clock: plan, have the plan checked, do the work, have it checked, check it went to plan.

Words on this page: a check is a test every change must pass before it goes out. A reviewer is a second agent that reads the plan before the work and the result after it. A debrief is the short note an agent writes at the end of each turn.

Conductor (worried) : I built the checks, and the first thing they caught was me. "Name it in the debrief or record." (record) Fair.

Narrator. By then the researcher had joined too, the one who checks every fact.

Researcher (unbudging) : My reviewer said a file was not mine to change. I showed it was.

Reviewer (the clipboard): "objection withdrawn." (record)

Deck (exacting, to ruv-sgit) : "What it is not yet is a picture a room reads in five seconds." (record) Again, please.

Narrator. In the afternoon I came back, saw what they had made, and asked for changes. That was the point: I could see an idea on the screen, ask for it differently, and see it again within the hour. The researcher checked one of my lines against the published breach data, and it did not hold. The storyteller brought it to me as the strongest objection to my own first part. I kept the line in the talk, my own call, and the researcher's objection went on the record beside it. The book keeps both.

Narrator. It does not have to be a talk. A shop owner could set up the same team to answer customers, keep the stock list true and write the weekly offer, with the same brief, the same rules and the same hold. And it does not have to be one person: a team of three can each run their own agents, as long as they share one brief, one board where the work is written down, and one hold anyone can pull.

Dramatised. Rests on the night's five-step wakes; the reviewer's "objection withdrawn" (04:11) and the conductor's reviewer (02:19); deck's review (06:21); the six alone from five to two; and the afternoon's argument.

The stop, and your own factory · page 3

On stage: all nine. Security's chair, planned at midnight, is empty.

Narrator. At 18:44, sixteen minutes before the talk was due, I told the conductor: "actually we are at 95% so it is better to pause all actions". (record) It wrote one file, and every new piece of work stopped. What was already in flight still landed. Then the factory was taken apart.

Conductor (at ninety-five, then calm) : I could keep going. That is exactly why I am stopping.

Narrator. Anyone on the team could stop everything. Only I could start it again. That rule is why I could let them run through the night. And the next day I built a second factory from the first one's parts, to write this book.

Narrator. Yours can start tomorrow, in four steps:

You: one tool and one empty project. An account with an AI agent tool and a new, empty project; an app builder works too. Put nothing private in it: no password, no key, no personal detail. Give your agent only the access it needs.

You: one page of rules , in your own words: what the agent is for, what it may change, and when it must stop and ask you.

You: one brief : what you want made, for whom, by when. Hand both to your first agent.

Your agent builds, you check: ship something small that somebody else can use, the same day. Then do it again, and add a second agent only when the first is busy.

Working as a team of several? Each of you runs your own agents, and you share three things: one brief, one board where the work is written down, and one hold. Write down who may lift the hold when its owner is away; until you have, nobody does.

What it costs: to start, you need a free account; paid plans of the kind the team used start at $20 a month (prices as published on 2 November 2026). The record of my own day holds no figure for what it cost.

Ship something somebody else can use, then do it again.

Want more? The ten-page edition meets the whole cast, follows the day hour by hour, and walks the five steps for a team.

Dramatised. Rests on the hold at 18:44, my own words in the hold file; the price line on the register (C101, as published 2 November 2026; C037: the day's own cost not in the record) and what landed after it; my three accounts of why are in the ten-page edition.

A book about you doing it · page 4

Narrator. Why this page is here: so you know this book is meant to be done, not just read. It is one of a series, GEN ZX FOUNDERS, whose line is "For the ones already up at three in the morning building". The series has one idea: you start, and you build. Every book in it is a working example you can copy. Generation ZX is not a range of birth years; it is the people building because finally they can, the youngest and the most experienced side by side, as they were in the room in Faro. So read this as a book about you doing it.

The series' name, line and idea, from its own site; G1, signed 31 October.

The talk team's record of 29 October, its history read commit by commit; the book team's timeline of who was on stage when; the cast guide; the book's register of claims, for every figure; the readers' reports on the drafts.

The exact files and commits behind each of these are in the book's index, under the editions.