If you’re a small business and not everyone is building, you’re stuck

If you are a small business and you don’t have everyone on your team writing code, you’re dead in the water.

This is a hot take, so let me be clear. I don’t mean you should hire only engineers. I don’t mean your receptionist should be pushing core infrastructure. I mean that every person in your organization should be leaning on agentic coding to build the internal tools they need to win.

There’s been a big push for AI "efficiencies" from C-suites who are divorced from the day-to-day. It’s always prescriptive: “Use X tool to do Y 10% faster.” It doesn't work. True leverage comes from permissionless building.

We’ve been frustrated with Framer lately. We spent more time on workarounds than on actual design. So, I sat down with our head of sales for an hour to teach him Cursor. He’d written maybe 10 lines of code in his entire life.

My hope? A rough HTML draft we could clean up later. The next day he showed up with the entire website. Dynamic. Connected. It scheduled meetings and collected data. But that wasn't even the big win.

Building it himself allowed him to realize he didn't need the dev team to carve out a demo mode in our production environment. He didn’t need to touch the core of our app, just a standalone “show room” interface that showcased our value perfectly without the overhead of the actual backend. He left the technical complexity to the engineers and focused strictly on the user experience he needed to close deals.

And now he’s talking about building a fully automated SDR.

He compressed a week of back-and-forth—of PRDs and planning and reviews and meetings—into 24 hours. That’s a week sooner he can start selling. A week of deep work back in the sprint for our engineers to focus on Feather’s core IP and the hard engineering problems that actually define our moat.

This is how we reduce risk and outpace incumbents. Every friction point is an opportunity to compound efficiencies, speed up building, and innovate. Because when you iterate on process as much as product, your team trades out gasoline for rocket fuel.