Army of One: How AI Turned Me Into a Shipping Machine

Welcome to the new format. This is the first post written natively for jessealton.com, my new home for documenting what actually works in AI development. No more Substack imports. No more cross-posting. Just direct shipping of ideas and outcomes.

Let me tell you what the last four years have looked like.

The Handcuff Years

I have been coding for 15 years. Maybe more. I worked in tech for most of my career, bouncing between strategy, product management, sales, and design leadership. I led design teams. I architected $100 million modernization efforts. I taught Product Management and AI at a respected art college. I became damn good at understanding what users need and how to build products that matter.

But I could never ship my own ideas.

Every vision required convincing developers to take me seriously. Every prototype meant begging someone to work for equity or reduced fees. Every delay meant watching opportunities slip away because I had to wait for someone else to write the code.

That is a shit recipe for success.

The Four Year Transformation

Four years ago, AI development tools started getting good enough to matter. Not perfect. Not AGI. Just good enough that someone with coding experience and product instincts could actually build and ship.

I went from stuck to unstoppable.

In the last 13 months alone, I have shipped:

Cadderly

My daily coordination agent that handles intent recognition, MCP integration, A2A agent coordination, and unified organizational memory. It learns from how I work and automates the tedious shit that used to eat my time. I use it every single day.

Peake.ai

Shipped Monday. Replaced our expensive, clunky VoIP service with an AI-enhanced phone system I built in one hour. LangChain automations came an hour after that. Now our BDR team uses it for all outbound calls. Cost dropped from $300/month to $47/month. Quality went up.

Jessealton.com

This site. My new home for ideas, built exactly how I wanted it. No compromises. No waiting for dev cycles.

Virgent.ai

My company site. Every case study. Every agent demo. Every piece of content. I built it. I shipped it. I own it.

Alton.tech

My portfolio site showcasing two decades of work across strategy, design, product, and now AI development.

Customer Agents

Dozens of production AI systems for clients. RAG implementations. Intent classifiers. Multi-agent workflows. Each one saves real money and delivers measurable outcomes. Like the financial publishing company where we saved them more than our entire fee in the first month. $10,000+ in monthly savings, 50% ticket reduction, ROI in under 60 days.

All of this. As an army of one.

I have an amazing team at Virgent and a huge bench of resources. My staff focus on supporting our customers and delivering value where it counts. I handle everything for the business myself—design, architecture, sales, development, strategy. If I bring in outside help, it is because they serve a specific purpose and they are talented at filling a gap I cannot. I do not waste company funds or resources getting others to do things I can do myself with AI. These projects? Vision to production. Solo.

What Made This Possible

I am not special. I just paid attention to what was actually working.

LangChain for orchestration. RAG for knowledge retrieval. WebLLM for privacy-sensitive operations. MCP for tool integration. A2A protocols for agent coordination. Real tools solving real problems.

But here is what really mattered: I already knew how to build products. I understood user needs. I had architected complex systems. I had led teams through modernizations. AI tools did not teach me how to think. They removed the bottleneck of implementation.

That is the unlock.

The MagickML Lesson

Before Virgent, I co-founded MagickML. We partnered with Google. We built the first agent development environment. We had vision, technology, and backing.

We failed spectacularly.

Partnerships are hard. Timing matters. Markets are unforgiving. But I learned more from that failure than from most successes. I learned that outcomes matter more than hype. That shipping beats planning. That you need to control your own stack or someone else controls your destiny.

Those lessons shaped everything I build now.

What I Am Building With Cadderly

Cadderly is my obsession right now. Coordination agents are the future of how work gets done.

Most people think about AI as a chatbot. Ask a question, get an answer. That is useful but limited.

Coordination agents orchestrate multiple systems, manage context across tools, recognize intent, and route work to the right place. They do not just respond. They coordinate.

Cadderly handles:

• Advanced intent recognition — Understands what I am trying to accomplish, not just what I typed
• MCP integration — Connects to tools and systems using the Model Context Protocol
• A2A coordination — Agents talking to other agents, handling complex workflows autonomously
• Unified memory — Nothing gets forgotten. Every meeting, decision, and context stays accessible

I use Cadderly to manage my entire workflow. It is the operating system for how I work.

The Future I See Coming

Here is where this gets interesting.

The next wave of SaaS will not just be software. It will be models.

Think about it. Google has a model for SEO excellence built from billions of searches. LinkedIn has a model for networking and lead generation trained on professional interactions. Salesforce has a model for CRM workflows refined across thousands of implementations.

Right now, those models are locked inside their platforms.

Soon, they will be licensable, composable, and hot-swappable.

Imagine building a startup where you can integrate Google's SEO model, LinkedIn's networking model, and Salesforce's CRM model. Not their software. Their intelligence. Their patterns. Their optimization strategies.

Or imagine indie artists licensing models trained on their creative process. A writer's model capturing their voice and structure. A designer's model encoding their aesthetic decisions. A musician's model reflecting their composition style.

Entrepreneurs will build businesses by curating and combining these models through coordination agents like Cadderly. The barrier to entry drops. The speed of innovation accelerates. The competitive landscape shifts.

This is not some distant future. The infrastructure is being built right now. MCP enables it. A2A protocols make it possible. Coordination agents orchestrate it.

What This Means For You

If you are an engineer, architect, or entrepreneur reading this, you know the tools have changed. You can feel it.

The question is whether you are using them.

I do not mean trying ChatGPT a few times and giving up. I mean actually integrating AI into your workflow. Building with it. Shipping with it.

Because the people who figure this out now will dominate the next decade. The ones who wait will spend that decade trying to catch up.

I sell to mid-market, high-growth companies. Not broke startups chasing hype. Companies with revenue, customers, and real problems to solve. They come to Virgent because we deliver outcomes. Production agents. Measurable ROI. Real savings.

You can do the same thing in your domain. You just have to start.

No Excuses, Just Outcomes

I do not believe in micromanagement. I do not believe in social entrepreneurship. I do not believe in excuses.

I believe in outcomes.

Everyone in the room is there for a reason. Do your job or I will replace you. That applies to me too. If I cannot deliver, I do not deserve the work.

AI has made me better at delivering. It removed the friction. It eliminated the waiting. It gave me leverage.

But it did not do the work. I still had to understand the problems. I still had to architect the solutions. I still had to ship.

The tools just got out of my way.

What Comes Next

I am going to keep building. Keep shipping. Keep documenting what works.

This blog will be where I share the unfiltered truth about what I am learning. No fluff. No hype. Just real outcomes from someone in the trenches.

If you are here for AI thought leadership from someone who has never shipped production code, you are in the wrong place.

If you are here to learn from someone who has built, failed, learned, and built again — stick around.

I have been coding for 15 years. Teaching for years. Leading teams for years. Struggling to ship my own vision for years.

AI fixed that. Now I ship constantly.

You can too.

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Check out Cadderly to see what coordination agents can do. Explore Virgent AI if you need production AI systems for your company. Read my case studies to see the actual results we deliver. And stay tuned here at jessealton.com for more.

You can try to reach me on LinkedIn but I fucking hate LinkedIn. Don't try to sell me anything—I won't buy it. I will however replace you with AI, so be careful how much you tell me in your cold pitch emails and spam.