Man and Machine - The #Blueprint
Wednesday afternoon I sat down for what I thought would be a quick work session.
I ended up tightening a job description down to a one-pager, copyediting a fintech article for publication, running a full competitive intelligence brief on an EMEA-based authentication company entering the US, reviewing January financials to flag a pipeline issue, and upgrading an AI gateway on a server in my closet.
Five tasks. Five completely different domains. One sitting.
A year ago that would have been a full week of context switching and scattered calendar blocks.
The difference is not that I got faster. The difference is the architecture underneath.
Over the past few weeks I have built a personal AI infrastructure that currently runs 9 agents, 26 skills, and 30 scheduled jobs across multiple models.
Steve and Jamie handle a lot of the heavy lifting. Steve scans my morning newsletters and pulls the signal from the noise. I stopped missing the important thing buried in the twentieth email I never had time to open. Jamie runs multi-model research across competing platforms to find the best answer, not just the fastest one. Another agent builds presentations from rough outlines.
This week I wrote a 10-section architecture manual for the entire system. Infrastructure topology, agent roster, skills catalog, cron schedules, security posture. I wrote it because I realized that if you are going to run an AI operation, you need to treat it like one.
I am a payments CEO with a math education degree. I am not a developer. I built this entire system by describing what I wanted and iterating until it worked. That has always been my approach: iterate to great, one careful step at a time, and never skip the boring parts.
The result is not a product, and it is not a startup; it is just how I work now.
I genuinely do not think I am going back.
What is the one task you keep doing manually that you know an AI could handle if you just sat down and wired it up? Let me know -dg
#ManAndMachine #CEO #CFO #CIO #AI #BuildInPublic #Dwolla #Fintech Dwolla #Leadership