Act III is where the series earns its title. February to May 2026, recapped — before the story finally walks into the office.
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- The weekend rebuild — already-proven ideas, deliberately re-packaged one rung down for a work audience. The first backtrack, and the moment this series’ team thread begins.
- The dinner IDE — ten untracked terminals became a Kanban board for terminals before the plate was empty. Five days later it had an MCP server; the board became shared memory with the agents. Also: the Mac-only scar.
- The rename — persona → harness, one breaking commit on April 6th, the evening the first AI Week cohort walked in. The practice existed for months before the word arrived; when it arrived, I paid full price for it.
- Package the environment — harnesses as versioned, installable, forkable artifacts, with a marketplace in the IDE and dogfooding loops all the way down.
The one-line version of Act III: “who the AI is” became “what surrounds the model” — and everything that surrounds the model became software. It took the industry a season to hand me the word. It took me one afternoon to build a Homebrew tap for it.