Opinions backed by things I actually shipped.
One person plus agents is a real operating model in 2026. The design question is not what the agent can do, but which verbs you refuse to delegate: push, merge, declare done.
A portability stance, not a privacy one: keep your project's history, decisions, and state in three plain files you own, and any AI tool can pick up exactly where the last one left off.
A practical follow-up: compacting, context trimming, handover files, and model routing to reduce token overhead in long agentic sessions.
In my agentic AI sessions, 85-98% of token spend was overhead. Here are the changes that actually reduced it.