A Zerg Is Born (or, how I learned to stop worrying and feel the AGI)

May 22nd marks the day I went from a script kiddie PM to a junior fullstack engineer, all thanks to a system we’ve built around Claude 4, Github Actions, and Linear. We call it The Zerg.

The Least Technical Technical Cofounder

My cofounder Nimesh is an extremely good engineer. As the least technical cofounder (i.e. I have a CS degree but chose the dark side (product)), I’ve generally tried to lean into other things I’m better at.

But early stage startups are all hands on deck, and sometimes the most important thing there is to do is build.

By being an early adopter of Cursor, Claude, Codebuff and other codegen tools, I’ve been contributing regularly to the low stakes parts of our codebase - frontend, scripting, admin panels, prototyping, etc.

But everything changed when the Zerg was born.

This may or may not be an ATLA reference

Code While You Sleep?

I’m now firing off schema changes, building integrations, creating inference pipelines, and optimizing performance with the best of ‘em.

Not only that, but I can do things that my former PM-self could’ve only dreamed about.

Here’s a recent example - about an hour before a customer call, I realized that an integration we were planning to demo to a customer was broken. Before I got on the MUNI, I created a ticket in Linear with some basic details on the issue and relevant error logs.

By the time I got to the office about 15 minutes later, The Zerg had picked up my ticket, written detailed docs and acceptance criteria, fixed the issue, tested the build, and had a nice PR wrapped and ready to deploy. Just like that, the issue was fixed. It even improved the UX by adding relevant icons. It felt truly magical.

During that demo we ran into a different, unrelated bug - ah, startup life.

The Future Is Here

Working like this feels like flying. I can’t even imagine going back to old ways of work, with bottlenecks at every handoff, missing context, and incomplete communication. We can have a discussion, whiteboard a solution, and have it basically built in an hour. I know startups moved fast, but this is something else.

Even for more complicated changes, we can spin up an auto-swarm (more on that here) or pair program with Claude Code’s deep codebase context to get it done in a fraction of the time it might have taken before.

My cofounder Nimesh rewrote our entire backend to dramatically improve performance in a day - before it would’ve taken a week (or more).

I was able to have a 10 minute conversation with Claude Code about how to build our core integrations, then it automatically created beautifully documented, step-by-step tickets with dependencies, test plans, and acceptance criteria clearly laid out, and then implemented each ticket in the correct order.

We’re pretty confident every team is going to be using something like The Zerg very soon - with some flows becoming completely autonomous and others sped up 10x, all by closely collaborating with AI systems customized to work in your codebase, with your team, and in your organization.

Don’t Stay In Your Lane

The beauty of this workflow is that it allows everyone to fluidly collaborate and contribute in deep, meaningful ways from the get-go. Product development will no longer be a piecemeal, stop & go process - staying in your lane is a thing of the past.

Engineers can create beautiful designs, designers can fix annoying bugs, and PMs can get an idea in front of customers in hours instead of weeks (or months). Teams are going to be able to do so much more so much faster, and it’s gonna be a lot more fun.

Anyone motivated by shipping cool shit that solves real problems is gonna thrive.

The only questions left are going to be what to build, and why. We’ll get to those later.