Balance independence with sync. Too much disturbance kills focus; too little causes drift.
Tools
GitHub Issues and Projects — Single source of truth for decisions, tasks, and prioritization. GitHub Projects board is where work gets tracked. Customer feedback flows here too — Discussions for feature conversations, Issues for bugs, Projects for prioritization.
Slack — Lightweight coordination. Long updates belong in GitHub. Huddles for real-time discussion when async isn't cutting it.
Devin — AI software engineer with a dedicated Slack channel. Treated like a colleague with transparent workflow.
Dev tools — Zed, GitButler, Cursor, Claude Code.
Escalation
- Phone — Truly urgent, can't wait
- Slack mention — Reasonably urgent, can wait hours
- GitHub — Everything else, async
AI-Augmented
A small, mission-aligned team augmented with AI can outperform companies with hundreds of people. We use AI teammates (Devin, Claude Code) for routine engineering work, content generation, and codebase maintenance. See Automated Workflows for specifics.