Introducing YAGNI: your whole company, on one page.
Why I built one agent that has read your whole business, runs a Team for every part of it, and keeps your team and its agents working from one shared page.
I’ve been building software companies for twelve years. Epic EMR. Mesa Labs. Galore. Demoflow. Gondola. MoveHQ. Sully. Two acquisitions. One Techstars batch. And across every single one of those companies, different industries, different team sizes, different go-to-market motions, the story was always the same.
Somewhere around employee eight or ten, the business stops fitting in anyone’s head. There’s a Slack for communication, a Notion for docs, a Linear for projects, a HubSpot for the pipeline, a Stripe for the money, a calendar that runs everyone’s day, and an inbox that has quietly become the real operating system because it’s the only place everything touches. Each of those tools is good at its job. That was never the problem.
The problem is that each tool knows its slice, and nobody holds the whole picture. So the person on the hook for everything, usually the founder, or a chief of staff, or whoever runs ops, becomes the integration layer. They reassemble the state of the business by hand, every week, from a dozen browser tabs. The status meeting exists because the company’s one shared picture has to be rebuilt out loud, every Monday, from memory.
I watched this happen at every company I worked on. I did it to myself more than once.
Every tool knows its slice. Nobody holds the whole picture.
Here’s the honest diagnosis. At five tools, each one knows its part and you keep the rest in your head. At fifty, the rest doesn’t fit anywhere. Not in any one tool, not in any one person, not in Monday’s standup.
The cost stopped being the per-seat licences a long time ago. The real cost is a tax on your attention. You’re working across the whole business and not doing any of it fully, and the honest question underneath all the noise is simple: what should you be working on right now? None of your tools can answer that question, because answering it takes the whole picture, and each of them only ever sees a slice.
Reading your tools was never the hard part
Every AI product now connects to everything you run. Access stopped being the problem two years ago. The problem is the shape.
A sidebar lives inside one tool and knows that tool’s slice. Notion’s AI knows your docs. Gmail’s AI knows your inbox. Neither has any idea what’s happening one tab over, so their suggestions are polite and shallow, and the whole picture is still your job.
What changed is that models can now hold enough context, and take enough careful action, to be a colleague rather than a feature. One agent with one memory across every tool you run. You talk to it like a colleague and it talks back in a consumable way. You tell it the thing it couldn’t see, the context that was only in your head, and it carries that forward. It gives you its read and how confident it is, and it tells you when it’s not sure, instead of just telling you that you’re right.
That’s a different category of thing. That’s not a smarter notification. That’s a colleague with perfect memory and no context-switching cost.
Introducing YAGNI
In software engineering, YAGNI is a principle from extreme programming: You Ain’t Gonna Need It. Don’t build what you don’t need yet. I’ve always liked it because it’s a discipline principle, not a shortcut. It’s about building the right things, not just fewer things.
For years I read it as a verdict on the tool stack, and I was wrong about that. You’re going to keep the tools you have. They’re good at their jobs, and ripping them out is a fool’s errand. What you aren’t gonna need is the next tool you were about to buy to make the rest of them make sense, and the operations hire you were about to make to run all of it.
YAGNI is one agent, @yagni, that has read your whole business and works right next to you on everything you touch.
Here’s the structure. Every part of your business gets a Team: a part of the company the agent watches and runs, fed by the tools you already pay for. The Sales Team reads HubSpot, Gmail, Stripe, and your calendar. The Engineering Team reads Linear, GitHub, and Sentry. Each Team shows you where it stands, what it’s watching, what it’s weighing, what’s next, and it holds the few decisions that actually need a person.
Each Team publishes what it finds to everyone’s Front, the one page where the whole company stands, with the Brief as its dated snapshot. So sales sees what engineering is shipping, engineering sees what sales is asking for, and support sees the bugs going out. Humans and agents work from one shared context, without a status meeting to sync it.
Underneath that, the Inbox triages everything that lands with honest receipts: amber means it needs you, teal means it’s already handled. The Feed is where work gets done, one item, one chat, with the real artifact in front of you instead of a summary of it. The Library holds the docs and context the Teams read and write. And @yagni is beside you on every one of those surfaces, scoped to exactly what you’re looking at.
The agent does the routine, reversible work on its own and logs every step so you can trust it without checking it. For the calls that carry real consequence, it proposes the move with its reasoning and how confident it is, and you approve it, decline it, or talk it through and refine it. Nothing with real consequence ships without your nod, and every call you make teaches it your judgment.
What this actually looks like on a Tuesday morning
Let me make this concrete, because “one agent across the whole company” can sound abstract.
You open the Front. The Brief is ready before you are: where each Team stands, what’s already handled, and the few calls that are yours, on top.
Overnight, forty emails landed. Most are already handled and filed, each with a receipt that says exactly what happened. This morning there are three ambers. One is the partnership reply you owe Rachel. The draft is already written, grounded in your last thread and your calendar, and @yagni tells you how confident it is in it. You read it, tighten two sentences, approve it, and it ships back out through your own Gmail.
The Sales Team is showing a stalled deal, and instead of making you go ask around, it’s pointing at the two Linear tickets blocking it. The Engineering Team already published last night’s fix to everyone’s Front, so support saw the bugs going out before the first customer wrote in.
Your leadership meeting starts in an hour. The agenda is prepared against your Calendar, grounded in the same picture everyone else has been reading all week. The meeting doesn’t open with twenty minutes of status, because everyone read the same page. It starts at the decisions.
It’s eleven in the morning and you haven’t opened a single dashboard. Neither has anyone else.
Your tools stay yours
This is the part I want to be unmistakably clear about, because it’s where YAGNI is different from what I would have built five years ago.
YAGNI is additive. You connect the tools you already pay for, and the Teams start working from what’s already there. Your Stripe data stays in Stripe. Your Linear tickets stay in Linear. We don’t host your apps, and we don’t migrate you into our database. The picture is shared; your systems of record are unchanged. When you approve a draft, the work ships back into the tool it belongs to.
The only thing YAGNI replaces is the next tool you were about to buy, and the hire you were about to make to run all of it.
Per workspace, not per seat
Per-seat pricing made sense when a seat meant a person doing the work. Now the agent carries the routine and you make the calls, so the seat is the wrong unit. Attention is the bottleneck, not logins.
YAGNI is priced per workspace. Invite your whole leadership team, your whole company, without changing the bill. You pay for the work, not the headcount.
Who this is for
I built YAGNI for the person on the hook for everything.
Sometimes that’s a chief of staff or a head of product ops at a company of 30 to 75 people, who is the manual version of this product today: the human who reassembles status across a dozen tools so everyone else can have one picture. Sometimes it’s a technical founder at a five-person company who is their own chief of staff and would rather build the product than the spreadsheet about the product.
Either way, you’ve felt it. You run on good tools, you operate none of them fully, and every week you pay the attention tax to stitch the story back together. You may have even tried to fix it with one more tool. (I have. Multiple times.)
Become an autonomous business
That’s the destination. Not a business that runs with nobody looking. A business where the routine is carried for you and logged, the whole team and its agents read the same page, and your attention goes to the few calls that are actually yours.
Connect two tools today. Tomorrow your team is reading the same picture your agent is working from. Soon the routine is handled before you sit down, and what’s waiting for you is the short list that’s actually yours.
If you’re the person on the hook for everything, and you’ve ever ended a Monday still wondering what you should actually be working on, YAGNI was built for you.
Try it at yagni.app.
Jack Collins is the founder of YAGNI. He has 12 years of software experience and is a Techstars alum with two prior acquisitions. Find him at @JackCollinsHQ on X.