Headcount Zero

I run a company where the departments are AI agents and the org chart is a folder of brains. I set direction and I judge the work. That is the entire staff.

01The idea

Most companies keep how they work inside people's heads. Every hire is months of training that walks back out the door the day that person leaves. The company pays twice to learn the same thing.

I keep it in repositories instead. Every role is a brain. Every procedure is a playbook. The reason behind a decision gets written down where the next run can read it. Agents operate those repositories around the clock. I read what they produce, correct it, and decide what ships.

Nobody here got replaced. Nobody was hired. This is not a layoff story. It is a constraint I picked on the first day, when there was nothing to protect, and I would pick it again.

02The removal test

Unplug the AI for a week. If the company still runs the same, it was never AI-first. It was a normal company with a chat subscription, which is a fine thing to be as long as you say so.

Mine fails that test on purpose. Take the agents away and the work stops, because the agents are the workforce. That is the design, not a weakness I am hiding.

I wrote up how to run the test honestly, including the part where you will be tempted to cheat it.

03The era

The one person billion dollar company is the loudest prediction in tech right now. It has not happened. Nobody is there. Anyone implying otherwise is selling you something, and I would like you to notice what.

I am not there either. Headcount zero is the operating discipline for the people racing toward it: what to write down, what to hand to agents, and what to keep human. More on the era and what the racing actually looks like.

04What lives here

hc0.ai is where I write the method down. Field notes, operating architecture, and the arguments I keep having with myself, published as they harden. It comes from a real company that runs this way: search campaigns, content, creative production, and daily operations executed by agents in terminals, with one person holding the judge's seat.

There is also work you can hire me to do, which is on the services page, priced there rather than behind a call. There is exactly one thing on it, because there is exactly one thing I can do for you today without pretending.

05Field notes

The notes go out whenever something is worth writing down: what an agent got right, what it broke, and what had to be rewritten as a result.