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We're All Builders Now

Posted March 11, 2026 by Brian Dainton
We're All Builders Now

Eric and I have always called ourselves builders.

It's accurate. As many-time founders, we've built companies, cultures, teams, and software from the ground up.

These days, Eric runs dev teams at Cloudflare, and I coach engineering leaders, but we both can see and feel that the software world we've known and loved for decades has shifted irrevocably. The roles, the team structures, the flows, practices, and ceremonies we've shaped and successfully harnessed in the pre-LLM world have quickly become obsolete.

But let us not despair.

New ways of working have emerged, and -- with them -- a new role, the Builder. And, honestly, as a founder...I fricking love it.

The Builder

Three roles have defined software for decades: design, engineering, and product management (back in the day, we used to call our organization "DEPOT", an acronym for "Design, Engineering, Product: One Team"). Now, the walls between those disciplines have collapsed, and the person who thrives is the one who can hold all three in their head at once, make good calls across them, and execute autonomously.

That's a Builder. A single operator who combines judgment, taste, architectural/conceptual wisdom, and strong communication skills to ship tangible outputs using AI agents as their primary means of execution.

I've seen others refer to this role as an Agent Orchestrator.

    As a Super IC.

    As an Agentic Engineer.

But I think the role holds a simpler and deeper responsibility than those terms capture, and "Builder" works across domains (software, marketing, security, quality, platform, etc.), so...I'm going with that.

The principle is simple: every role that builds something becomes a Builder with a domain specialization, and every role that primarily coordinated gets absorbed.

With the execution bottleneck removed, one Builder does what a cross-functional team of 5+ people used to do (what, 6 months ago?). The Builder does the thinking, and the agents provide the hands.

So Now We're Building

Fairly Fantastic is where we build for fun. It's where we take everything we know about design, engineering, and product management and put it into practice, shipping real software as a two-person team, planting some seeds, nurturing their growth, and learning along the way.

Right now, I'm taking the lead on building 18Recap, a product (near and dear to my heart) for golfers to create epic, shareable recaps of their golf rounds, and I'm having the time of my life. If you're a golfer, please check it out.

Stack Snapshot, March 2026

This is gonna be a recurring bit in my blog posts.

With everything moving soooo fast, the toolkit I've used to build has changed dramatically from month to month. But I make it a daily habit to absorb as much of the goings-on-in-the-dev-world as possible, and a weekly habit to keep my tools and practices fresh. Here's my March 11, 2026 Stack Snapshot:

That's it. I gotta get back to building. Cya!

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