Six months coding exclusively through agents: twenty VMs at peak, and the management layer died before the agents did

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A practitioner writeup published 27 August reports six months of shipping code only through agents, scaling from one agent to a dozen and running about twenty disposable Linux VMs at peak, with some task branches sitting untouched for weeks before being abandoned. The author built botd to provision VMs, track tasks across agents, preserve conversation history and allow mobile oversight, and reports that botd itself collapsed under architectural complexity this month, replaced by an architecture-first coding agent called Shelley with asynchronous tool execution. The concrete lesson for builders is that at a dozen agents the bottleneck moves from the agents to the orchestration and task-tracking layer around them.