The Last Dev Standing
February 25, 2026
8 People Who Understood the Code vs 1 Person Who Understood the Problem
Founders are burning $50K, $100K on agencies. Getting half-finished products and missed timelines in return.
The agency model used to mean hiring an agency. Now the dev with the most agency replaces one.
Here's why that matters.
Marcus had $120,000 left in the bank
He'd given $80,000 to an agency six months ago. They had a Slack channel with 8 people in it. Stand-ups every morning. A project manager who sent color-coded Trello updates.
It felt like progress.
It wasn't.
Every week, something new. "We need to revisit the scope." "The backend dev is blocked." "We're waiting on design approval." Eleven people, zero momentum. Like pushing water uphill with eight different hands.
Month four, Marcus stopped sleeping.
Month five, he stopped checking the Trello board.
Month six, he wired the last invoice and got a half-finished product that solved a problem nobody had actually asked him to solve.
Then he met Jordan
Jordan didn't have a team. Didn't have a pitch deck. Showed up to the call in a plain gray shirt and asked one question before anything else:
"What does success actually look like for you?"
Not features. Not tech stack. Not timeline.
Just, what does meeting your expectations look like?
Marcus talked for forty minutes. Jordan listened. Took notes. Asked maybe three follow-up questions, each one cutting closer to the bone than the last.
By the end, Marcus realized something uncomfortable.
The agency had been building what Marcus said he wanted. Jordan was after what Marcus actually needed. Those were two very different things.
Jordan worked alone
No standups. No Slack channels with emoji reactions to every message. No project manager translating between a developer who didn't understand the business and a founder who didn't understand code.
Just one person, holding the whole problem in their head at once.
This is the thing people miss about solo operators.
It's not about being cheaper. It's not even about being faster, though they usually are. It's about coherence. When one mind holds the whole picture, nothing gets lost in translation. The left hand knows what the right hand is doing because they're the same hand.
A team of ten has ten different mental models of your business. Most of them wrong. All of them partial. And every time they sync up, something gets distorted.
Jordan had one mental model. Accurate. Complete. Updated in real time.
And with Agentic Coding tools? That one person could move faster than ever. Less context switching. No waiting on someone else's sprint cycle. Just clear sight of the problem and the ability to act on it directly.
That's what agentic actually means. Not a buzzword. Not a feature. A person who owns the outcome and has everything they need to chase it.
Three months later
Marcus had something in users' hands.
Not finished. Not perfect. But real; something that solved the actual problem, built by someone who understood why it mattered, who'd lose sleep if it didn't ship.
Skin in the game.
That's the phrase that kept coming back to Marcus. The agency had been contractors. Professionals. Competent people doing a job and going home.
Jordan acted like a co-founder who happened to write code.
The rarest thing
The world is full of people building the wrong things very efficiently.
Eleven people in a Slack channel, moving fast in the wrong direction.
The rarest thing isn't talent. It's not even skill.
It's one person who genuinely cares about the outcome. Who sees the whole board. Who wakes up thinking about your problem because it's become their problem too.
That person used to be impossible to find.
Now they're everywhere. Armed with tools that give a single focused mind more leverage than a team of ten ever had.
The agency gave Marcus eleven people who understood the code.
Jordan gave him one person who understood the problem.
There's only one of those you actually need.
If you're a founder stuck in that cycle, this is what working differently looks like. Learn more about our approach.