The rise of the employee-less company

This week I finally caved. I needed to see what all the hype was about.

So I bought a $20 ChatGPT subscription to use Astra, and blew through my usage limit immediately.

And that’s how I ended up with a $100/month OpenAI subscription.

In 2015, it was clear to me that there would be a massive shortage of software engineers, so I became one and helped others do the same with my books The Self-Taught Programmer and The Self-Taught Computer Scientist.

In 2026, AI has massively changed software engineering, and it is equally clear where things are going: the rise of the employee-less company.

By company, I don’t just mean venture-backed startups or even indie hackers. If you are a consultant or fractional executive, you are running a company. If you sell books or digital products, you are running a company, and the new technologies you have access to will give you (or you and a co-founder) the opportunity to accomplish as much as ten or twenty people could in the past.

I’ve already experienced this firsthand. I built my own GTM command center, which I’m releasing as a SaaS, and used it to run a B2B content funnel that got 5.6 million views on social media in the last three months.

I demoed my GTM command center to my Dad today, and he suggested I create a process where customers can submit feedback and bug reports from my software’s dashboard, and it gets sent to an agent that runs triage and sends me a list of suggested fixes/changes for approval, updates the code, and deploys. A few years ago, doing that was science fiction. Today, you can do it in a few days.

Then I got off the call and told Astra to set up a database backup system for the software I’m building. It logged into my hosting platform, upgraded my plan to a higher tier, created a backup database, set up a schedule for backups, logged into Cloudflare, created another backup database, synced them, set up a schedule, and set up automated emails to keep me updated on the health of my backup databases.

All in probably seven minutes.

These changes are why I’m focused on building an employee-less company.

My goal is not to take a swing with a big VC-backed company. My goal is to build a profitable, employee-less company, with agents doing most of the work, and me making the high-level decisions AI isn’t good at.

I will keep documenting everything I learn as I go, so you can apply it to your own companies.

And learn what not to do, too.