A couple weeks ago I saw a YouTube video about people pinning Codex threads and treating them like agents.

I thought.. wait a minute. That's easy.

So I ditched the complicated setup I'd been trying to force with Hermes and started doing exactly that.

Here's what was actually wrong with the old one. I'd added agents to save time, and then became the person responsible for coordinating every agent. Still the bottleneck. Still copying information from one place to another. And now with more tabs open.

So in Codex I made a Chief of Staff..
A CMO..
A project manager for software development..
Smaller specialist agents that pull in transcripts from Zoom, Otter, and Pocket AI recorder.

Here's what that looks like in real life.

An idea hits me.

I open Wispr Flow and talk it out with the chief of staff.

We develop the idea. We figure out the customer, the problem, the moving pieces, and what a first useful version could look like.

Then it hand work off to my project manager.

The project manager turns that conversation into the actual work:

The ClickUp tasks

The subtasks

The correct sequence

The dependencies

What's blocked by what

The milestones and dates

Who needs to do the next thing

That's the part I used to do myself.. Or.. often.. neglect and do a half-way job with..

Now the project has a real plan before anyone starts randomly building.

My Chief of Staff can send a message to my CMO. My CMO can send a message to my project manager. My project manager can hand work to the right worker and get the result back.

I can see the history, what was decided, and the messages moving between them with all decisions stored in ClickUp and Github.

It feels a lot more like having a small team in Slack than trying to operate a complicated software automation machine.

Three things made the difference:

Each agent got a real role.

Each one got a durable home where it keeps context, decisions, and open loops, plus access to the systems it needs.

Agents can hand work to other agents when the next move is obvious.

It's been pretty transformative..

Building software well has always come down to a handful of judgment calls that nobody else can make for you. Understanding the business problem underneath the request.. deciding what shouldn't get built.. designing the customer experience.. verifying the finished system actually does what it's supposed to do.

I've got a lot more room for them now.

Speaking of which.. I have one custom software build opening coming up in November.

If you've got an idea, a valuable process, a customer journey, or a half-built system that deserves to become a real application.. send me a message.

We can talk through what you're trying to make true and whether I'm the right person to help build it.

🚀

​- James