Two Loops - Keith Brown

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I spent the last few days building using some of the latest AI tools and models. Nearly didn’t sleep, seriously.

Was up for nearly 24 hours straight, building out several working prototypes at the same time. It was a big mental shift from what I’m used to.

Instead of planning out a quarterly roadmap that was blocked by humans, I found myself spinning up agents to work on one thing, while toggling over to work on another. While one set of agents worked on one thing, I left them alone, and went to check on the progress of the other agents.

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang said recently that "everybody in the world is now a programmer", and I can see what he is talking about. By the end of the 24 hour sprint, I had two working prototypes.

Normally I would have needed to hire a designer, a product manager, and creative, a marketer, a front end engineer, a back end engineer, and a QA manager to get all this live. I’d say a few years ago the cost of what I’ve done in the last 24 hours would be somewhere between $50,000-$100,000 if I had asked 3 dev shops for a quote.

Mark Zuckerberg published an open letter this morning, but he didn’t say the quiet part out loud. He talked about the abundant future with AI. He talked about how many more startups and businesses we will have. But when anyone can build anything, building is far less of a moat than it used to be. It’s the growth loop that becomes the differentiator.

It’s crazy to say. But product managers, lower level engineers, UX designers, QA testers, and most marketers are no longer leverage. They are partially a drag on your velocity. That still feels weird to say.

The nitty gritty is more nuanced. Most people are still using even the strongest models wrong. They treat them like better chat or autocomplete instead of actually building proper agent loops with evaluation and state. That gap gets a lot bigger when you move from prototypes into production.

I talked recently about these two roles as Builders or Growers, and I’m going to expand on that idea today. Those are the two functional roles I think most companies should be focused on. And what those people should be doing are working in loops. With the goal being faster and faster loops.

The challenge is for the first loop, more humans actually slow things down. And for the second loop, I believe most companies are currently way understaffed.

Here’s what I mean…

Loop 1: Building (More Humans is Worse)

The first loop is pure execution. It requires as few humans as humanly possible to strip out organizational drag.

Old Way: Customer feedback -> Support ticket -> PM discovery -> Designer mockup -> Engineering sprint -> QA testing -> DevOps deployment. (6 weeks)

New Way: Customer feedback -> AI Telemetry -> Prototype -> Ship. (6 minutes)

When a single-threaded Builder runs this loop, you prototype faster than a PM can schedule a kickoff meeting. You push the fix before support can even log the ticket.

Reliability, edge cases, security, integrations, and owning the system over time still need real human judgment and systems thinking. The builders who pull ahead aren’t just the ones spinning agents the fastest. They’re the ones who can make those agents compound without creating a mess a few weeks later.

But the reality is this. Teams of thousand of engineers will become hundreds. Teams of hundreds will become dozens. Teams of dozens will become 10 or less. Seriously, just anything more will just slow them down.

If a process or a role doesn’t directly talk to the customer or directly push the code, cut it.

It sounds so counterintuitive, but I can tell you that if you told me I had to spend the last 48 hours doing anything but working directly with AI agents in loops, I’d tell you that more humans would just slow me down.

Loop 2: Selling (More Humans is Better)

The second loop is distribution. It requires as many real humans on the front lines as you can deploy. And you should always be hiring. Always be ramping up. Always be transitioning out the lower performers.

This is the other thing that will be a massive mindset shift. For years you didn’t want sales out in front too far of product. You wanted as many salespeople as engineers, because your sales team was already "waiting on that next feature" that a big customer wanted.

When anyone can build software in an afternoon, digital marketing noise explodes and software commoditizes. In that world, real human trust skyrockets in value. I’m all in on humans.

Take every dollar saved from flattening your middle engineering stack and pour it into human rainmakers:

Private dinners and executive roundtables

Keynote speeches, media, and authentic domain authority

High-touch, high-trust customer success operators who drive retention

Heavy human sales. Heavy customer success. Light, rapid builds.

The Horizon

This two-loop model is how every winning company will operate for the next three to five...