Companies as Code

We have reached the point where coding agents are no longer just tools for writing software.

They are becoming practical enough to move into operational work.

This is the step change. Previously, agents were impressive but fragile. They could draft, summarize, code, and automate pieces of a workflow, but they were expensive and brittle enough that most serious operational work still needed to be routed through humans.

That is changing. Frontier models are becoming more pragmatic and more capable, while the cost of running useful operational loops is falling. With models in the class of DeepSeek V4 Pro and other frontier systems, it is now possible to do real company work for pennies on the dollar.

That changes what a company is.

If you view a company as a series of inputs and outputs, the shape becomes much clearer. Inputs are inbound forms, calls, emails, texts, walk-ins, support requests, purchase orders, applications, tickets, and conversations. Outputs are delivered services, shipped products, completed tasks, materials, reports, approvals, responses, and decisions.

A company is a platform that transforms inputs into outputs.

And if a company is a platform, it can be controlled by agents in the same way software can. The agent reads the input, decides what system state needs to change, invokes the right tools, asks for help when needed, and pushes the work toward an output.

This is why 2026 feels like the year where we begin to see more companies run by agents. Not just chatbots on top of companies. Not just copilots beside employees. Agents inside the operating layer of the business.

There are already pieces of this forming around us: Polsia, Cofounder, Codex automations from OpenAI, Devin automations, OpenClaw, managed agents from Claude Code, Supercenter, The Company Company, and many more.

The important thing is not any one framework. The important thing is the direction.

The model and the agent capture maximum value like a whirlpool. This is how the AI labs are designed. The more work the model can absorb, the more value flows toward the model provider, the agent runtime, and the orchestration layer.

That pushes human value outside of whatever the agent can currently grasp.

Taste. Intuition. Emotion. Trust. Judgment. Relationships. Context. The parts of work that are still hard to formalize become more valuable, at least for a while.

But inside a company, the agent will keep expanding. By nature, it will try to grasp more. A workflow becomes a tool. A department becomes a system. A system becomes an interface. An interface becomes something an agent can operate.

Companies will become harnesses.

Departments will become harnesses.

Individual coworkers will become harnesses.

The question will not be whether agents can help with company operations. The question will be where the harness belongs, who controls it, and what human judgment is still kept outside the whirlpool.