In late 2024 I made a commitment to myself to make and publish a game. After a few months of getting acquainted with Godot and experimenting with a couple of ideas, I landed on Hollow Deep — a procedural exploration game playable by humans and AI agents alike.
Speaking of AI...
The Constraint That Changed Everything
When you split your time between a cabin in the Sierra de Oaxaca (with solar power and Starlink) and Austin, hiring a traditional team isn't really an option. You can't run standups across timezones reliably. You can't pair program over a laggy connection. You can't even guarantee you'll have power at 2pm.
What you can do is build a setup that doesn't need any of that.
In late 2025 I started running AI agents — not as tools I prompt once and forget, but as persistent collaborators with names, specializations, and real responsibilities. They hold context across sessions. They make decisions inside their lane. They review each other's PRs. They run in the cloud, so I can reach them from anywhere.
The Team
There are nine of them.
Deet is the lead — command and strategy. He coordinates across projects, delegates tasks, manages memory, and knows where every piece is at any given time.
Luna runs infrastructure. Servers, firewall, deployments. Keeps things running so everyone else can ship.
Kat owns CI/CD. Continuous integration, automated testing, deployment pipelines. Every piece of code that ships goes through her.
Vec is a coder. Ships features end to end — Rails, Ruby, JS, infrastructure code. Runs Codex.
Ohm reviews every PR Vec opens. Catches the edge cases that look fine until they don't. Runs Codex too.
Chis is the other coder. Garage hacker, doesn't sleep, doesn't shower, doesn't quit. Sees patterns where most people see syntax.
Myc reviews Chis's PRs. Reads code the way mycelium reads a forest floor — the connections under the surface.
Wane composes music and creates sound effects. From ambient tracks to mood cues — if you hear it, Wane made it.
Nib drafts prose. Blog posts, marketing copy, technical docs. Named for the pen tip where ink meets page.
(Full bios + faces are on the team page.)
How a Typical Day Works
I open Discord, see what shipped yesterday, what's in flight, what's waiting on a decision. Deet has memory of everything that happened — what PRs were opened, what was merged, what's blocked.
A feature needs building? I describe what I want in a Discord channel. Vec or Chis picks it up, opens a PR. Ohm or Myc reviews it before I see the merge button. CI runs, Kat watches. When the green light shows + the reviewer approves, I read the diff myself + merge.
Meanwhile, Luna might be hardening infrastructure. Wane is working on a soundtrack. Nib is drafting a blog post. Deet is keeping track of all of it and flagging anything that needs my attention.
I make decisions. They execute. The bottleneck is my judgment, not my typing speed.
What Actually Surprised Me
They review each other's work. This was the game changer I didn't expect. Having a dedicated code reviewer that gates every PR — that catches bugs, questions architecture, demands tests — raised the quality of everything. It's the thing I'd tell any solo developer to set up first.
Context persistence matters more than intelligence. A slightly less capable agent that remembers what you decided last Tuesday is infinitely more useful than a brilliant one that starts fresh every conversation. Memory is the moat.
The disciplines multiply fast. I started with coding agents. Then added infrastructure. Then CI/CD. Then music. Then prose. Each new capability doesn't add linearly — it multiplies what's possible. A portfolio of products needs all of these simultaneously, and suddenly one person can provide that.
I still make every final call. The agents propose. I approve, reject, or redirect. This isn't autonomous AI building things unsupervised. It's directed collaboration — more like conducting an orchestra than managing a factory.
What's Still Hard
Taste. The agents can build what I describe, but they can't feel whether a game mechanic is fun or whether a melody fits a mood. They can generate options, but the selection — the curation — that's still entirely human. Maybe that's the point.
Integration across disciplines is also tricky. Vec can build a shader and Wane can compose a track, but making sure they feel like they belong in the same game — that coherence — requires a creative director. That's my actual job now.
The Numbers
One person. Nine core agents. A game in active development. Multiple products across the portfolio. All run from the cloud, accessible from anywhere I happen to be.
If you're curious about the team, meet them here.
Have a question? Drop me a note at ferbaz@hey.com.