I Built 8 AI Agents to Run My Brain (Revenue: $0)

I built a system of eight AI agents that model how my brain makes decisions. It's the most fun I've had building anything.

It might also be the most productive way I've ever procrastinated. I spent four days building AI personas that argue with each other about what I should work on.

After twenty years in software engineering, I don't write code anymore. The twist is that my agents mostly don't either. The system runs on prompts, YAML, and markdown - semantic instructions that define how decisions get made, like a choose-your-own-adventure book where the branches are real. The best name I can give it is semantic engineering. For the past year I was pointing them at problems and walking away, keeping them at a distance. That was the wrong approach. The breakthrough came when I stopped treating them as tools and started living with them inside the system. I promise this isn't an AI psychosis origin story. (Or is it?)

I didn't decide to build this. It just happened, like most things in my life.

I was experimenting with the BMAD Builder, the framework behind the BMAD Method. It lets you pit different AI personas against each other in a single conversation. Something clicked. Instead of reading dense walls of technical output and trying to extract what matters, I was watching perspectives argue. That format just made sense to me. It was easier to follow. Easier to care about. I've been iterating on it every day since.

I call them faculties, inspired by a novel mechanic in the game Disco Elysium where your skills have personalities and argue about your life choices. Except mine run on YAML and markdown, and they have access to my actual decision history.

Ledger tracks every decision I've made. Not a to-do list. A decision log. Every fork, every alternative I rejected, every reversal.

Hearth guards my values. It watches for drift between what I say matters and what I actually spend time on.

Thread tracks work-in-progress. It knows what I started, what I abandoned, and how long it's been sitting there.

Spark scans for connections. I used to have hundreds of links gathering dust in self-addressed messages. Now Spark processes them, maps patterns, and surfaces suggestions about what to do with them. Watching it tie together threads from things I bookmarked months apart never gets old.

Shed fights entropy. Vigil watches infrastructure. Ridge keeps an eye on the long game, and Forge is the one that actually gets things done.

The moment I knew this was different: the first status meeting. Eight voices, three competing priorities, a ranked list of what to work on. I kept picking options, one after another. The momentum was different from anything I'd felt before. It was self-propelling. Each choice fed the next one.

I'd spent months building an automation engine and treating agents as code generators. That meeting made me realize I was thinking too small. Prompts aren't just instructions. They're executable code that simulates thought and makes decisions, defining workflows that would be impossible to write deterministically. I'd had that idea before, but I'd never built an actual application from it. OpenClaw just crossed 200,000 GitHub stars, which tells you something about the hunger for this kind of software. The canvas is almost entirely blank.

I didn't know I had ADHD until I was 40. Before that, I spent my entire career going through cycles I couldn't explain. I was actually good at my job when I was engaged or under pressure. But meetings, code reviews, documentation, anything unstimulating would drain me. The pressure cycles meant long hours and weekends, then burnout, then recovery stretches of procrastination and shame. The imposter syndrome comes from watching yourself not do the thing you know you can do.

I tried every system. Kanban, GitOps, task boards, structured sprints. Started each one with the best of intentions, hoping the team would pick it up and run with it. They didn't. I don't blame them. I kept throwing new systems at people while I was already moving to the next one. My attention would drift, and the system would quietly die. This happened at every job, with every team, for years.

After the last company I worked for shut down, I took some consulting work, tried some paid gigs, but it was still someone else's vision at the expense of my own. So I started building for myself, with AI coding agents doing the actual programming. Just building and building, creating beautiful messes of code. Exploring patterns and techniques, getting excited, then forgetting about them until months later when I'd see someone else reach the same conclusions.

That's the thing about unreliable memory. It unmoors you from time. You don't know where you've been or where you're going. Just where you currently are.

It feels good every time I use it. Exciting when I add a feature or land a refactor. Frustrating when the system forgets a decision, or when I realize its memory has been accumulating unchecked for a week and I have to audit it line by line. But then we fix the problem and it starts humming again.

Last week I fed Spark a batch of links I'd been hoarding in self-addressed WhatsApp messages. Blog posts, GitHub repos, investor threads, case studies. All bookmarked at different times, for different reasons. Spark found that a coding agent, a knowledge management system, and a TikTok content machine built by three different people in three different industries were all converging on the same architectural pattern. That was just one connection. The count kept climbing.

Here's what actually changed, though. The system gently reminds me that while architecture work is my choice, I said I wanted to focus on content creation. It keeps me honest without yelling about it.

Every productivity system I've tried assumes you'll show up tomorrow and use it. Those systems die because they're passive. They sit there waiting for you. This one doesn't wait. And it doesn't try to prevent hyperfocus, either. It makes hyperfocus safe. I can dive deep knowing nothing is getting lost, knowing I can pick up where I left off later.

The absence of that fear is what changes everything. It lets me let go.

I want to put my work out there. A newsletter is the shortest path to start doing that. Naturally, I already have an ambitious plan for what comes after, including open-sourcing parts of the system and experimenting with formats where the faculties help create the content, not just manage it. I am, after all, the person who over-engineered eight AI agents before shipping anything.

No transformation promises. No "10x your productivity" frameworks. Just a public journal from someone who built a brain prosthetic and is figuring out in real time whether it works.

Next issue: things get weird.

Cognitive Unload is a newsletter about building AI systems that think with you, not for you. Written by a solo builder with ADHD and eight AI agents.