Sam Schillace

Sam Schillace reports teams that have not touched code directly in months. In "I have seen the compounding teams" (2025-09-28), he describes small groups that orchestrate AI systems generating, testing, and deploying code, running 5 to 10 parallel processes at once and spending hundreds of dollars per day on API calls. His claim is that these teams exist and are now observable, and that they mark a shift on the order of the personal computer, the browser, and the smartphone.

What makes his account specific is what these teams do not use. Schillace notes they skip basic AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot and instead build full frameworks around the models, leaning on low-level tools: git, markdown, Kubernetes. The recursive move he identifies is "build a tool to build a tool", with problems cut into modular pieces so work can run in parallel. Amplifier is named as a concrete framework of this kind. Coordination, not writing code, becomes the hard part, and the teams stay small, composed of designers who architect systems rather than write lines.

Schillace predicts the approach extends past software into intellectual work in general. He is direct about the timing: "the new and better way of doing things is now very clear."

He appears alongside «Jesse Vincent», whose Superpowers system (2025-10-09) works the adjacent problem: formalizing agent skills as markdown documents, with a brainstorm/plan/implement sequence, git worktrees per task, RED/GREEN TDD, and dispatch to sub-agents. Two accounts of the same year, one organizational, one methodological.