Zero Alignment

Maggie Appleton argues that the current paradigm of individual developers commanding fleets of AI agents misses a fundamental truth: software development is inherently collaborative.

"Nine women make a baby in one month" logic doesn't apply -- scaling individual productivity without team alignment creates chaos.

Implementation has become cheap and fast. The bottleneck shifts from "How do we build it?" to "Should we build it?" "When production is cheap, opportunity cost becomes the real cost."

Existing tools (GitHub, Slack, Jira, Linear) weren't designed for agentic development. They create a pattern: planning in fragmented places, implementation accelerates dramatically, review happens too late. The pull request bears impossible weight as a coordination mechanism.

"Software is not made by one person in a vacuum. It's a team sport."

"All these tools are single player interfaces."

"Agreeing on what to build is the new bottleneck."

Solution direction: teams need integrated environments combining planning, communication, context-sharing, and development. GitHub Next's prototype "Ace" demonstrates multiplayer sessions backed by cloud microVMs for collaborative agent-driven development.

Reclaimed implementation time should fund deeper thinking, better research, and higher craft. Quality becomes the differentiator in a world of cheap code generation.