No backlog / no deadlines / focus dates
Backlogs grow faster than they ship. Once one-prompt changes work, the queue itself is the bottleneck — kill it; commit to start-dates instead.
What
A cultural rule with three components: (1) no backlog — any idea that arrives is faster to ship via an agent right now than to file as a ticket; (2) no deadlines — the team commits to focus dates (when work will start) rather than due dates (when it must finish); (3) ideas in the founder's head get reduced to zero because the queue is the bottleneck, not the typing.
Why it matters
One reference deployment runs this as the operating model. The founder reports: "I have no unrealized ideas in my head — never had that in my life." Half the headcount, faster growth, every metric up. The pattern only works once graph density is high enough that one-prompt changes ship the same day; before then it's aspirational. Treat as the destination, not the starting point.
End-to-end
- Audit your current backlog. Categorize items as: ship-now (one agent run), needs-spec (a few days), genuinely-deferred (waiting for an external event).
- Kill the ship-now category — work them this week, all of them.
- For "focus dates" semantics, change your task tracker convention: each task has a "start by" not a "done by." Surface the start date in dashboards; remove the due-date column.
- Hold an explicit "no-backlog day" monthly: anything older than 30 days gets shipped, archived, or deleted.
- Coach engineers out of over-decomposition. The new bottleneck is people who break tasks into 6 sub-tasks for the agent instead of letting the agent decompose.
- Expect attrition. People who need deadlines and tickets will self-select out over a few quarters; that's the cost.
Gotchas
- Without high graph density (codebase context, naming conventions, internal docs), one-prompt shipping fails and the team reverts to backlog frustration. Don't adopt this until #163 + #168 + a documented codebase are in place.