A Month Later
Convergence
I was startled by how much had changed in a month.
A month ago, Jenny spent a weekend building an agent and a set of skills that were genuinely impressive. When I saw them, I immediately understood how they could become a model for a problem I cared deeply about. I wrote a couple of documents to show how what she built could serve as a model, then built a small workflow to pull the data she had created.
And then I stopped.
Not because the idea wasn’t clear.
Not because the model didn’t exist.
I stopped because I couldn’t yet see myself as the person who could build the next thing.
At the time, I wasn’t comfortable with the idea that I could build a production agent and skills of my own. Even with a working example in front of me, it felt like something other people did. Something I could reason about, review, and maybe extend later, but not originate.
That belief didn’t change through planning or discussion.
It changed on a Sunday.
Ten days ago, I sat down and tried.
I focused. I followed the shape Jenny had already proven out.
In addition to the core functionality, I built a test harness. I added a way to manually upload data outside the skill. Even before everything was complete, I could exercise the system end to end.
I hit one issue, and it was an issue Jenny had run into. I recorded a short video, shared what I had, and asked for guidance on my direction.
On Monday, we talked it through. The issue wasn’t a failure point. It was just the next piece of the system.
I put together a north star and an architecture document. I played with code to prove to myself that an endpoint was within reach. Then I set it aside to deal with more immediate needs.
When I came back to it, the landscape had shifted.
The two other amazing engineers on the project had written a skills tester to prove the quality of what we were building. I pulled it into my branch.
My work held up. Not perfect, but good opportunities to harden the experience.
The pull request that had been sitting in draft for ten days finally felt ready to become real.
At the same time, JM took the architecture work and turned it into a concrete design for the aggregation endpoint. He started implementing it.
That’s when the picture snapped into focus.
The durable‑artifact north star was no longer theoretical. I was finishing my product to PR‑complete on the producer side. JM was building the aggregation endpoint on the consumer side.
If those land together, we get a clean end‑to‑end story.
The producer emits.
The data is durably captured.
It flows through an aggregation endpoint.
It shows up in reporting.
No hand‑waving in the middle.
That convergence is the real impact. Not that someone started implementing something, but that the system itself is assembling from both ends.
A month ago, I did not feel ready to build something like this.
Now, in a very short span of time, I am.
When I realized it would likely come fully together by the end of the week, I cried. Just a little.
Not because it was hard.
Because it was real.
Alison + Wiggins