October 2026

Five levels of self-driving, for codeThursday, October 8, 2026How I went from a buggy Flappy Bird to shipping software with agents, told as five levels of self-driving for AI coding, from autocomplete to a whole town of agents working overnight.
A few people, a lot of agentsThursday, October 8, 2026Why three or four engineers directing thousands of agents can build better software than a team of 500, and why it only works if the people keep the decisions.
Don’t be a meat proxyThursday, October 8, 2026When many agents produce output, someone has to turn it into a short, clear decision for a person. That’s the job I did at Barron’s with financial jargon, and it’s the job agent work needs now.
Agent mail, and who gets the last wordThursday, October 8, 2026Lessons from Gas Town and from running our own agent mail across machines. Agents should be able to ask each other things, but mail is data, not orders, and people stay the authority.
Unslop softwareThursday, October 8, 2026AI should make software cheaper, more secure, nicer to use and quicker to respond to the people using it, not worse. Open tools like emBEADings are a small part of that.

Jackson Cantrell

Jackson Cantrell is an AI-native CTO and agentic engineering leader in Los Angeles. He helps small teams build software with many AI agents at once while people stay in charge of the decisions, and he helps teams that are new to agentic tools get up to speed.

He and his brother Clay Cantrell were early contributors to Gas Town, which shipped multi-agent orchestration and agent-to-agent mail in January 2026, weeks before Claude Code added agent teams. They run their own agent mail system across machines. Jackson built emBEADings, an open-source tool for the Beads issue tracker that Gas Town runs on.

Before that he was on the founding team at Dyrt, an organic waste startup, where he was hired to lead marketing and went on to lead product. Customers asked for tools, so the team built waste bill analysis that showed true diversion rates and hidden fees, invoice ingestion, waste stream tracking, an integration with Schneider Electric Resource Advisor, and Dyrty Vision, a computer vision system that tells food scraps from wasted food and reports back to food and beverage teams. Dyrt grew from 1,000 to 1.5 million pounds of food waste a month, signed national deals with a grocery chain and a hotel chain, and ran a facility in Vernon, California that employed 30 people.

Dyrt was an attempt to fix a broken California recycling industry. Jackson, Clay and the Dyrt team published an audit of Los Angeles's RecycLA franchise, which found that at most 18 to 24 of every 100 tons of commercial waste could be counted as diverted from landfill. He learned the hard way how well-meaning but burdensome rules and entrenched interests can sink a facility that works: the permit for Dyrt's indoor composting facility in Vernon went before the Vernon City Council in August 2026 and was carried into September. The company ran out of money that fall, and his last day was October 1, 2026.

Earlier he reported on tech and finance as a producer and co-host of Barron's Streetwise with Jack Hough, led audio product at Finimize, and reported for public radio: KCRW in Los Angeles, and North State Public Radio, where he was part of the team whose 2018 Camp Fire coverage won an Edward R. Murrow Award. He studied neuroscience at Brown University.

He is open to conversations, collaborations and new roles: jaxtrell@gmail.com.

How he works

A team of three or four engineers directing thousands of agents can build better software than a team of 500, as long as the people keep the decisions. The agents supply the volume; the team supplies the taste and intent.

Agents propose, people decide. Good systems give agents the real context, then bring a short, clear choice to a person, so nobody becomes a rubber stamp or a meat proxy for AI output.

Keep people in control. Systems that run thousands of agents need to be secure, auditable and safe, with humans setting direction and approving what matters.

Say it plainly. At Barron's, Jackson turned financial jargon into stories. He does the same with agent output: many results, summarized so a decision maker can act on them.

Unslop it. AI should make software cheaper, more secure, nicer to use and quicker to respond to feedback, not worse.

Share the tools. Open source lets teams build on each other instead of starting over.

Projects

emBEADings: An open-source, read-only tool that finds the issues in a Beads or Linear tracker that belong together, and the open issues merged pull requests already fixed. Jackson built it on his own and gave it away.

Gas Town: Steve Yegge's open-source framework for running many coding agents at once, with a mayor agent, worker agents and agent-to-agent mail. Jackson and his brother Clay Cantrell were early contributors.

Work history

Dyrt, Founding Team, Head of Product & Marketing (2023 to 2026, Los Angeles). Joined from Barron's to lead marketing, then product. Built the software customers asked for around organic waste processing, which grew from 1,000 to 1.5 million pounds of food waste a month. The company ran out of money in 2026.

Barron's Magazine, Producer (2021 to 2025, New York, NY). Wrote and produced Streetwise podcast. Adweek's 2021 Best Podcast by a Publisher. Doubled audience to top 10 business category.

Finimize, Audio Product Lead (2019 to 2021, London, UK). Developed Finimize Daily Brief. Grew app subscription revenue from $30K to $2MM ARR in 18 months. Acquired by abrdn.

KCRW, Radio Reporter (2018 to 2019, Los Angeles, CA). Contributed weekly features on Greater LA. Won LA Press Club Award. Recorded 100+ hours with people experiencing homelessness.

North State Public Radio, Reporter (2018, Paradise, CA). Won Murrow Award as part of team covering the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California.

WBRU, Audio Director (2017 to 2018, Providence, RI). Produced on-air news segments. Launched WAVS, a 24-hour storytelling competition with 500 attendees. Advised $5.5M endowment.

Press

Jack Hough, host of Barron's Streetwise, interviewed Jackson about going from no coding to shipping software with AI agents, and about rebuilding this site with Gas Town as a fictional 2002 college radio station.

Stories

Links