Day one was the install. Day three was the part I didn't see coming.
By then I had a new problem, and it was me. I'd gone from one window — wow — to more terminal windows than a single human can babysit. Each one was off doing good work, and I was sprinting between them, ferrying context from this one to that one, losing the thread. The bottleneck in the whole operation wasn't the AI. It was the guy in the chair.
So this evening I just asked: "can't you start these sessions for me?" Turns out you can. "Sure — I can spawn subagents." One became a few. A few became... well. Tell it to "spawn a few agents" and you get a lot of agents, each one happily burning tokens. Careful what you wish for. (That exact itch is what later turned into a feature request — but that's the next stop.)
Hiring a crew
That nudged me from "more agents" to "the right agents". What do I actually need on a project? Not a swarm. A small crew: a frontend dev, a backend dev — both nudged toward my plugins and my components — and someone above them to coordinate. The way you "hire" one is almost embarrassingly low-tech: a little training file per role. One file of rules for the backend dev, one for the frontend dev, one for the lead.
Then they needed names. I'm rubbish with names, and I wasn't about to borrow them from people I actually know — so I took them from a story instead.
Bill got the backend, Luke got the frontend, and Bob — naturally — got to be the boss. One training file each.
For the non-nerds: one agent is an intern. A team of agents, each with a role, feeding each other work — that's a company.
And here's the part that genuinely surprised me: I built this to make my life easier — but it seemed to make things easier for the "machines" too. More structured, more fun, and above all more effective.
Letting them talk
The other habit that shaped all of this: every evening I'd scroll Twitter and YouTube for whatever Claude Code could do next. The single best tip came from Boris Cherny in the first video, which brought me here — just ask Claude Code for what you want. Obvious in hindsight, but it flipped a switch. So I started treating the crew like a real team: little feedback rounds, sometimes just with Bob, sometimes with everyone. What worked, what didn't, how's the communication between you? Out of those retros fell a dead-simple system — the team talks to itself through log files. Nothing fancy. It just works.
And the bigger the crew got, the better it ran — which is not what I expected at all. Faster, yes, but also better: several times better than going solo, a different category entirely. The frontend-trained dev automatically sweeps for frontend things, the backend one for backend things, and when work gets handed out that just... happens, without me micromanaging who does what. The next morning I bolted on the one thing every grown-up team has and no loop ever does — a circle of trust, riding along automatically on everything. (The loop-lovers will groan. Let them.)
Making it legible
There was still one thing driving me up the wall. I'd hand the first real team a task, and then... a spinner. Claude's little thinking wheel, going round. After twenty minutes of apparently nothing I hit Escape, half-convinced it had wandered off. It hadn't — when I asked, it had quietly done this and that and the other thing, all of it fine. Great. It works. But I want to see it.
That's the actual Bobnet moment. The agents were already writing all those status lines anyway — so why not just show them? A small, boring dashboard that renders the logs the team is already producing. Five or six days later the first version was up, and it solved a genuinely huge problem: I could finally watch the bots work. I was in the picture.
That turned out to be the whole job of a team-lead, human or otherwise: be in the picture. Are the processes running? Is the circle of trust holding? It was never one clean shot — it was a process. And the wild part was how much better the teams ran once they ran visibly. From there it grew one piece at a time: a nudge when something needs me, a team page, the rest.
Because the next thing I started chasing wasn't a feature at all. It was the structure behind the team — what a "Bob" actually is, and why a story about a self-replicating fleet keeps being the right metaphor (thank you again, Mr. Taylor).
That was the Bobnet. A week later it stopped being one team — and started becoming a universe.
