Im so excited to announce Tenex Agents! Off-the-shelf, enterprise-grade AI agents focused on tackling recurring work across functions like Finance, Sales, Marketing, HR, and IT. Everyone & their mother is building/launching agents. So how are ours different? • < 2 weeks to deployment • Built for responsible oversight (permissioning, approvals, audit trails) • Optimized performance layer (model routing, evals, context management) • Custom configured for your processes & systems of record • Tied to agreed upon outcomes Our agents JUST WORK because they’re a labor of love, 18 months in the making. We started Tenex to help companies turn frontier AI research into real business results. Since then, we’ve built hundreds of custom solutions for some of the biggest companies in the world. Along the way, clients keep asking: “What are you seeing on the ground, and what should we be doing next?” We’ve studied the market and spoken with hundreds of executives. Three priorities kept coming up: 1) Faster time to value. See meaningful results quickly and cheaply. 2) A clearer starting point. Know which workflows to tackle and how to measure success. 3) A fit with the business. Work within existing systems, with the right access controls and human oversight. That’s when Tenex Agents said “hold my beer.” We’ve been quietly turned hair on fire customer processes problems into a suite of composable and battle-tested agents. They give you a ready starting point, with Tenex handling the implementation: • Up and running quickly. Most deployments targeted for under two weeks. • Configured for your business. Adapted to your processes and connected to your systems of record. • Built for oversight. Defined permissions, human approvals, and an audit trail. • Measured against an agreed outcome. A clear definition of success for the first workflow. We’re slowly rolling out Tenex Agents, so please fill out this interest form if you’d like to learn more:

Introducing "What if AI Goes Right?" There’s too much doomerism & “AI is going to kill us” talk, and not enough discourse about all the promise of this technology. So I'm starting a weekly essay series. Every week, I'll post a deeply-researched essay outlining how AI will solve the biggest problems in the world. The first essays will include: - How AI Will Cure Cancer - How AI Will Solve Free Education - How AI Will Create Efficient Governments - How AI Will End Aging - How AI Will End Poverty - How AI Will Create Energy Abundance (and what that will provide) Comment with an essay you'd want to read and follow to see the first essay on Friday.

10 most common AI transformation asks we get from enterprises right now (in order of frequency): 1) AI Diagnostic / ROI Study - Identify opportunities for AI, estimate ROI by use case, prioritize investments, and create an implementation plan. 2) Agentic Workflow Automation - Build agents, automations, and integrations that execute recurring business processes. 3) Architecture & SDLC Assessment - review codebase and architecture, identify technical debt and risks, evaluate engineers AI workflow fluency and create a modernization plan. 4) Security Testing & Patching - Test AI applications and agents for vulnerabilities, data leakage, prompt injection, and misuse. 5) Security Assessment - Identify security, privacy, and compliance risks and recommend how to address them. 6) Code Modernization - Legacy tech stacks create drag that decreases speed/accuracy for agents 7) Data Engineering - Build data pipelines, integrations, migrations, search systems, and knowledge systems. 8) MCP Gateway - Provide controlled access to models, tools, and data through authentication, routing, logging, and usage controls. 9) Model fine-tuning - Post-training an LLM on a smaller, targeted dataset so it gets better at verticalized task or domain. 10) Citizen SDLC - Give non-technical employees a secure, governed process for turning AI prototypes into approved production applications. Comment below with the use case # you're most interested in (i.e. #6# = code modernization), and I'll DM you specific insights from work we've done on it.

Slop is mostly solved imo. Agents now fail when they don't understand the bigger picture. Here's how I battle this issue, hoping you can just give this link to your agent and get results!

One of our ambitions at Tenex is to make NYC the AI capital of America. We know it’s a bit insane, but we believe it’s possible & we’re gonna try our hardest to make it inevitable. Just to show how committed we are, I’m pumped to announce Tenex’s new HQ. - Coming Jan 2027 - Will be home to 200 AI engineers, strategists, creators, etc - 20,000 sqft - 2 floors including penthouse for events - Podcast/video studios - Rooftop overlooking Madison Square Park Come join us:

I'm excited to share MetaHarness with you all. MetaHarness is the system behind @tenex_labs' SDLC, the principles it runs on, and what changes when agents become partners in development. With MetaHarness, our engineers can run 12-hour+ tasks and know that they will stay on track, follow our process, do the right thing. We haven't shared how it works...until now. There are 8 core principles, which we expand on in excruciating detail in the essay. 1) Context becomes part of the system 2) A blueprint that is allowed to change 3) We practice benevolent prompt injection 4) Tribal knowledge is embodied by shared skills 5) The development process has a machine interface 6) Validation makes autonomy safer 7) Tenex OS makes the process legible to the team 8) The process learns from the work If you want to evolve your own approach to building software with agents or transform an entire engineering org's SDLC, i highly highly recommend reading this in full.

Momentum is oxygen for startups. When you have it, you'll do anything possible to bottle it up, make sure everyone on your team knows how precious it is, and preserve it at all costs. When you're missing it, you only have one goal. Recapture it. You'll do things that don't scale. You'll will wins into existence. You'll do anything, literally anything to get it back.

I need to hire 100 people in the next 12 months. @tenex_labs is a rocket ship. Unlike anything i've seen. Our biggest bottleneck is keeping up hiring with the tidal wave of demand we're seeing. WTF is Tenex? We're a 15-month-old, NYC-based applied AI consultancy & lab growing 10x YoY. We help F2000 enterprises through the AI transformation journey & incubate new businesses based on our hard-earned lessons from spending each day inside the guts of enterprises. Tl;dr we're on the frontier, we're building cool shit, and we're having a ton of fun. We’re hiring for 5 key roles (from engineering to consulting to content). Let me break down each one: 1. Forward Deployed Engineer • No bullshit description: solve hard AF problems & build agentic systems for big, messy enterprises by living on the frontier of AI • Dollars & cents: $140-200k base; 80-184k annual bonus (average OTE: 302k) • Non-negotiables: 3-8 years building and shipping production software end-to-end, track record of turning complex problems into clean, scalable systems, and expert at using agentic coding tools to raise the quality and the throughput of everything you ship. • Interview process: app —> screen —> hiring manager —> take home —> systems design —> final round 2. AI Strategist • No bullshit description: Walks into a room full of skeptics and walks out with believers. You translate frontier AI into real business outcomes: part consultant, part builder, part closer, all trust. • Dollars & cents: $130-180k base, $20-60k annual bonus (average OTE: $200k) • Non-negotiables: can get smart on a business/client wicked fast, knack for building deep trust, minimum AI-proficiency ideally AI-fluency, commercially minded • Interview process: app —> screen —> hiring manager —> on-site panel/case study —> final round 3. Full Stack Creator • No bullshit description: 1/3 building with AI, 1/3 creating content about AI, 1/3 AI educator • Dollars & cents: $125k base, $30k annual target bonus • Non-negotiables: always on the bleeding edge of what’s happening in AI, ripping tokens like it’s your day job, love for creating content & teaching people • Interview process: app —> screening —> content assignment —> final round 4. Engineering Creator • No bullshit description: 1/3 engineer, 1/3 content creator, 1/3 AI educator • Dollars & cents: $180-200k base, $80-120k annual target bonus • Non-negotiables: 10x engineer, love for teaching others, strong public speaking abilities • Interview process: app —> screening —> hiring manager —> systems design —> content assignment —> final round 5. Content Engineer • No bullshit description: own Tenex’s long-form editorial content (newsletter + website franchises) • Dollars & cents: $140k base, $20k annual target bonus • Non-negotiables: whipsmart writer, obsessed with AI space & building AI systems, purveyor of narratives • Interview process: app —> screening —> writing assignment —> in-person working session —> final decision If you’re a fit, apply to one of our jobs here: If you know someone who is a fit, tag them below or share the post with them.

Tenex is the fastest moving company in the world. I'll give you an example. Last week, we made a decision to hire interns. 2 days later, our Director of Ops @BrettFranklin_ had a team of 5 interns working in our office. They even got a full onboarding program. The time from decision to action. That is speed. For us, it was 2 days. If you want to work in this kind of environment, reach out. We're hiring a ton at @tenex_labs

Extremely proud of our work with Advantage Solutions and @AnthropicAI. Advantage is a people-first business in a dynamic market. Dave Peacock (CEO) and Bethany Miles (CAIO) are market leaders in their AI roll out. Their roadmap shows a balance of ambition and practicality that has driven measurable results. And it's backed by the power of Anthropic's platforms. We're incredibly excited about the future of these partnerships.

The modern FDE role is closer to being a founder than being a consultant. A traditional consultant will diagnose the workflow, a solutions engineer will explain the architecture, and a software engineer will build a feature based on requirements. But the FDE has to do all of that while the requirements are still moving. They have to figure out which problem matters, sell the customer on a concrete path, build the first version, notice what breaks, explain the tradeoffs, and decide which parts of the work should become reusable. That is much closer to founder work than traditional delivery work. It rewards the person who can understand an ambiguous business problem, choose a path, build the first version, explain the tradeoffs, and keep moving while the requirements change constantly. In the age of AI, one person can now handle the full loop themselves, understanding the workflow, prototyping the system, testing it with users, and turning the result into the next version without waiting for a large team or internal beurocracy. That's why the FDE is becoming one of the more interesting roles in tech. It is generalist because the work itself crosses product, engineering, sales, strategy, and operations. If this kind of work sounds exciting, Tenex is hiring:

When my company was failing, I wasn't looking for a job. I didn't want one. I was a founder. You do that to build something you believe in, on your own terms, not to collect a title. The thing I'd built was dying, and the last thing I wanted was to become a line on someone else's org chart. So I wasn't updating a resume. I was asking a different question, the kind you only ask after something you built falls apart. Not what pays, not what's open. Just this. What could I give the next 10+ years of my life to and still wake up believing in? Almost nothing clears that bar. Ten years is a long time to keep believing in anything (assuming it will have very low lows). I had made a quiet peace with the idea that I might not find it. That maybe you get one real swing, and I had taken mine. Then I stumbled upon what @businessbarista and @ArmanHezarkhani were building at @tenex_labs , and for the first time I could see myself somewhere for 10+ years, which is extremely rare. I want to tell you why, because it is not the reason you would guess. I like to research and sometimes even write about what AI is doing to the economy and to our labor force. The economy is splitting into people who build with this technology and people who watch it happen, and the gap between them does not grow in a straight line. It compounds (like a K). Every month you spend on the wrong side of it, the distance grows, and it grows faster than you can ever close it later. I did not fully believe my own thesis until I was living inside it. Here is what the frontier actually feels like, with the hype stripped off. Most nights I kick off a run of AI agents before bed and let them work while I sleep. Some nights it is real work. Some nights it is just an experiment I want to see the shape of by morning. Either way, I wake up to things that used to take a team a week. My night and morning routines have completely shifted. Yesterday an old friend from high school messaged me. He is starting a local business, got quoted ten thousand dollars for a website, and wanted to know if that was fair. I told him to send me the exact specs he gave the guy who quoted him. Then I went to sleep. By the time I woke up Claude had built the whole thing. A custom site, a customer portal, wiring for his Stripe account, a database behind it, email set up, and deployed to his domain. He was dumbfounded and incredibly grateful. That is the gap I write about, sitting in a single text thread. Him, about to pay ten grand. Me, conjuring it between the gym and dinner. And it widens every single day. I still get to feel that same jolt, from the inside. I feel like the dumbest person in our Slack most days, and every time in my life that feeling has shown up, it came right before the biggest leaps I ever made. The ceiling above me is enormous, and I get to climb it every day. You do not learn this from a course or a newsletter. You learn it by doing it, all day, next to people doing it harder than you, on the actual frontier of the most important technology any of us will touch. That is why Tenex cleared the decade bar. The people are the smartest, most technical minds I have ever been around, and I get sharper just by being near them. And the vision is genuinely, wildly ambitious. You get one life. You may as well spend it going for the grand prize. Most people are somewhere fine, at a company that will get to AI eventually, telling themselves there is no rush. There is a rush, and it is the whole point. The years while this technology rewrites every job are the years that decide which side of that gap you spend the rest of your career on. Those years are happening right now, whether you are in them or watching them.

Working at startups is never easy. Doing it as an international hire, half a world from home, is a different game entirely. I kept making that bet anyway at lean, venture-backed teams, one of which became a unicorn...and every time I noticed the same arc. The high of building "the next cool thing," and once it wore off a feeling I couldn't name. For years I assumed that's just what startups felt like. Last September, around 2am, I was doom scrolling LinkedIn when I saw posts from @businessbarista , @ArmanHezarkhani , and @beanlawler_ about @tenex_labs . All three within five minutes. The company was only a few months old. I had almost no information about the problems I'd get to work on. And for a foreign worker, an early-stage startup isn't one bet, it's three: on yourself, on the team, and on a visa clock that doesn't care about either. What made me apply anyway was the vision: building a company that lasts in a post-AGI world, with a business model to back it up. Then came the conversations with Arman, Alex and the rest of the team at the time(basically @seejayhess and @dan_zakon ). I wont ever forget this voice in my head saying "this is it." when I walked back home from the final round. The intellect, the caliber, the desire to push the vision through...It made my blood rush and fortunately, I got a chance to join as the third engineer and the first international hire. Ten months in, after many learnings, complex challenges, and a lot of memories, I can finally name the feeling I could never shake at every startup before this one. It was the lack of a home away from home. That's what Tenex turned out to be. People I genuinely love, respect, and look up to. A team this nerdy, rigorous, fast-paced, and fun at the same time is rare. I didn't just join another startup. I found my tribe. If you want to find yours while working at the frontier of AI, we're hiring!

Most takes on AI's impact on the economy are lazy. So for the next 30 days, I'm going to share my data driven observations across 3 areas: 1. What AI is actually doing to the labor market 2. How it's reshaping economic opportunity 3. Where the new opportunities are and who's positioned to take them Right now, every take on AI and jobs is either hype or doom. One side is selling you something. The other is afraid. Almost none of it is backed by data. I sit on both sides of this one. I deploy AI into real companies for a living. And I'm a little too into labor markets (I read county level jobs data for fun...). Two rules I'm holding myself to: - Every post is personal and actionable to you or someone you know. - And I don't miss a day. First post drops tomorrow.