Companies, agents and human judgment.
The question behind nullfte
Agents are taking on real work. What stays with people, and what still needs a company around it?
Latest · · The banks are blocking AI agents. I let one in. · Read the account →
A company can run with very few people. It cannot run with no one, and the reasons are not the ones people expect.
6 min readThe foundations
Economists say companies exist because finding suppliers, agreeing terms and checking work takes effort. Agents can make that easier, and work inside a company easier too. Whether the company then shrinks or takes on more, nobody knows yet.
2 min readThe record
In every job here, the same line holds: the agent drafts, proposes, builds and checks; a person sends, pays and talks to people.
The organisation
Haier, Buurtzorg and Zappos show different ways to hand authority to small teams. What makes delegation work, and what carries over to agents?
3 min read
A note from the founder
In March 2026: one Mac Mini, €10,000, six months, and a question. Can a company run with zero employees? The experiment ended in April, when the agents moved into my real company instead, one job at a time, each time a person was missing. Since then the question has changed. Not whether a company can run without people, but which jobs still need one, and why.
nullfte is for the person who has to sign for what an agent does. The owner of a fifteen-person company. The head of a division of fifteen hundred. Same decision, different budget.
What nullfte isHow I examine the work
Three lines before a job is handed over: what the agent may do, what it is responsible for, and who answers. I first wrote them for the audit agent.
Read the method The jobs so far →The next chapter
New essays and field notes on companies, agents and the decisions that stay with people.
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