A ten-person company wrote down its founder's judgment

Spawn, a ten-person game startup, published an account of how it runs. Permanent AI agents own the engine, finance, bug triage and deploys. Last month they shipped 77,000 changes and spent $3.1 million on AI tokens, about 30 times payroll.

The interesting part is what broke. By October the agents were waiting on one person, the founder, who woke up to 700 questions about taste. So the team turned two years of recorded conversations into AI judges that answer the way he already had. In eight days the judges settled about 7,300 questions. He answered 27. The bottleneck in an AI company is the founder’s judgment, and most of it can be written down.

Simon Willison, who shared the piece, points out that Spawn has no revenue yet. A game is also a forgiving place to ship this fast.

As a small business entrepreneur, I see the same bottleneck: the work waits on my judgment, not on anyone’s hands. I switched on a small version of the same idea this week: a nightly agent that makes my routine calls and leaves me a list to undo. The judge is the part worth copying, and the speed only works where a mistake is cheap.