I want to be upfront about my biases as we embark on this journey together.

I think AI is an unstoppable paradigm shift that will cause immense social, economic, and political harm in the short term. I am baffled that the AI Bubble straddles two terrible outcomes. Either the economic model for the proposed use case is so untenable that it collapses our entire economy and leads us to a great depression, or it succeeds so immensely that it wipes out the entire middle class knowledge work labor market and kills opportunity for generations to come.

Either way, it is clear that our current political class will not step in to help in any meaningful way. Oligarchs have been conspiring for decades to take away our constitutional democracy in order to acquire wealth and power and (I believe) to drag us back into a feudalistic version of capitalism where wealth equals might equals power, and the few social ladders we are supposed to have are permanently struck down. They will choose to not help people even when they are struggling to eat, and we are in for a period of turmoil and strife at a scale the world has simply never seen.

Phew. That's the kind of talk that would net me weird glances from MBA's at corporate events. But who's laughing now, suckers? (It is still them, their stock portfolios are doing very well)

All that said, this blog series isn't about any of that.

Multiple friends of mine, all career software engineers at FAANG companies, have asked me to document my experience building this platform using agentic tools. I have the coding and system design knowledge of a junior engineer, but I'm competent, an avid learner, and I care about results. In many ways, I am precisely the kind of guy these tools are marketed for.

The purpose of this blog series is to share, as objectively as possible, my journey into collaboratively building an entire ERP at a scaling business with a small team. I am going to share the problems I am trying to solve, my approach, the tools we use, and report what worked for us and what didn't.

I'm actually having a really great time learning new engineering paradigms, and even though I'm not quite in the code anymore, I have rediscovered my love of building something tangible that makes other people's lives easier. I am learning a lot, and I hope you do too.