Prototyping as Leadership: How a CTO Ships with AI Agents — Hursh Agrawal, The Browser Company
AI coding agents let a busy CTO ship 2-10 PRs per week without extra hours
“the manager schedule, as Paul Graham put it, is suddenly usable as building time”
Hursh Agrawal, CTO of The Browser Company, argues that AI coding agents have fundamentally changed what technical leadership looks like, enabling him to ship code consistently despite a calendar packed with 15+ weekly recurring meetings. He frames hands-on building as now necessary — not just possible — for technical leaders, because frontier models change every three months and you can only understand their real capabilities by using them daily. This represents a meaningful shift in the expected role of engineering leadership in the AI era.