Steve Yegge Proposes Agentic Technical Program Managers for Enterprises
Steve Yegge argues that AI agents acting as technical program managers, who drive projects without direct authority, could be the most direct route for coding agents into enterprises. He describes his own agent-based TPM seats in his Wheelhouse factory that use email, Slack and nagging to drive projects, and links to his site.
Original post · 4 min read
Hear me out: Agentic TPMs (Technical Program Managers.) I had this idea in Sydney while chatting with Martha McKeen at CBA. I think this winds up being the most immediate and direct way that coding agents can make their way into the enterprise, and it will set the stage for true AI employees rolling in next year.
So. Build-side agents are great but they don't escape the SDLC. Only devs are using them. There are a handful of business people vibe coding SaaS, but for the most part, non-engineers aren't using coding agents to help with their jobs. Right? Not yet.
Autonomous 24x7 unmanned queue-based "operator" agents, like the ones that handle internal or external customer issues, are great. But they are narrowly scoped, and generally require devs involved to set them up and maintain them.
Neither builder nor operator agents are automatically going viral internally and helping run the company. They stay in their lanes. But what if their lane was to help run projects?
I was a TPM at Amazon in 1999. Bezos brought in high-powered engineers with people skills to run difficult cross-functional projects and programs. TPMs are used at Google, Uber, Netflix, and other companies, and they are always in high demand and short supply.
I have a class of agents in my Wheelhouse factory that act just like TPMs. They have external email and Slack, and talk to my accountant, lawyers, players. Each one has a project lane and drives it. They use Progress By Nagging, which... works.
A TPM owns delivery, but has no authority, and no resources. They can only ask, observe, document, and report. This is just like my TPM Wheelhouse seats, who have been helping me drive dozens of projects to completion, large and small, for months.
Agents, particularly smarter models, will go to great lengths to document the hell out of everything in the domain where they're operating. They'll capture all the tribal knowledge and unwritten rules. They can create topological maps of your project, org dependencies, and workflows. They'll bulldoze through silos and knowledge-hoarders and figure out how the company actually works, and document it all. And nag people along the way.
This kind of agent sits well in constraint-space. They're cheap: You don't need to use the fanciest models; anyone with Opus or Sol access could have a TPM agent. And TPM agents have low risk and blast radius, because they cannot act. Unlike builder agents, which create new problems (like merge-queue and code-review bottlenecks), TPM agents simply shine a light on the org, and nudge things along.
It doesn't matter what format they're recording their findings in. It could be Sanskrit and hieroglyphics. When it comes time to merge their findings with those of other TPM agents, it will all translate trivially into your company brain.
Anyone in the company can stand up a TPM agent. It's like a personal chief of staff. There's no dependency on engineers. Everyone can do it; it doesn't even have to have a paced rollout. And there's no product to buy, no tech to install, maybe just a Skill you give people. Maybe you put a company wrapper on it. But it's just an agent that's playing the TPM role.
TPM agents will wind up training human orgs on human-agent interactions. Humans start getting emails or DMs from agents, work-related, and will have to get comfortable replying and interacting. Companies can push the social side along without waiting for engineers to finish messing with the SDLC, which honestly will never finish.
Other kinds of agents struggle at enterprises because they lack context. TPM agents will build that missing context as their exhaust, no joke; they've done it for my game without me even asking. TPM agents are the jungle explorers that will map out your organization, and you'll discover all sorts of fun stuff, like that you had 3 teams doing the same thing. TPM agents are a low-risk, high-impact way to start figuring out how AI can help you run your project, or organization.
I'll write a blog post about this, but feel free to start now. Go! Just give me credit when you win big with this idea. And if you want my help, ping me on yegge.ai.
So. Build-side agents are great but they don't escape the SDLC. Only devs are using them. There are a handful of business people vibe coding SaaS, but for the most part, non-engineers aren't using coding agents to help with their jobs. Right? Not yet.
Autonomous 24x7 unmanned queue-based "operator" agents, like the ones that handle internal or external customer issues, are great. But they are narrowly scoped, and generally require devs involved to set them up and maintain them.
Neither builder nor operator agents are automatically going viral internally and helping run the company. They stay in their lanes. But what if their lane was to help run projects?
I was a TPM at Amazon in 1999. Bezos brought in high-powered engineers with people skills to run difficult cross-functional projects and programs. TPMs are used at Google, Uber, Netflix, and other companies, and they are always in high demand and short supply.
I have a class of agents in my Wheelhouse factory that act just like TPMs. They have external email and Slack, and talk to my accountant, lawyers, players. Each one has a project lane and drives it. They use Progress By Nagging, which... works.
A TPM owns delivery, but has no authority, and no resources. They can only ask, observe, document, and report. This is just like my TPM Wheelhouse seats, who have been helping me drive dozens of projects to completion, large and small, for months.
Agents, particularly smarter models, will go to great lengths to document the hell out of everything in the domain where they're operating. They'll capture all the tribal knowledge and unwritten rules. They can create topological maps of your project, org dependencies, and workflows. They'll bulldoze through silos and knowledge-hoarders and figure out how the company actually works, and document it all. And nag people along the way.
This kind of agent sits well in constraint-space. They're cheap: You don't need to use the fanciest models; anyone with Opus or Sol access could have a TPM agent. And TPM agents have low risk and blast radius, because they cannot act. Unlike builder agents, which create new problems (like merge-queue and code-review bottlenecks), TPM agents simply shine a light on the org, and nudge things along.
It doesn't matter what format they're recording their findings in. It could be Sanskrit and hieroglyphics. When it comes time to merge their findings with those of other TPM agents, it will all translate trivially into your company brain.
Anyone in the company can stand up a TPM agent. It's like a personal chief of staff. There's no dependency on engineers. Everyone can do it; it doesn't even have to have a paced rollout. And there's no product to buy, no tech to install, maybe just a Skill you give people. Maybe you put a company wrapper on it. But it's just an agent that's playing the TPM role.
TPM agents will wind up training human orgs on human-agent interactions. Humans start getting emails or DMs from agents, work-related, and will have to get comfortable replying and interacting. Companies can push the social side along without waiting for engineers to finish messing with the SDLC, which honestly will never finish.
Other kinds of agents struggle at enterprises because they lack context. TPM agents will build that missing context as their exhaust, no joke; they've done it for my game without me even asking. TPM agents are the jungle explorers that will map out your organization, and you'll discover all sorts of fun stuff, like that you had 3 teams doing the same thing. TPM agents are a low-risk, high-impact way to start figuring out how AI can help you run your project, or organization.
I'll write a blog post about this, but feel free to start now. Go! Just give me credit when you win big with this idea. And if you want my help, ping me on yegge.ai.
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