My work on Agent OS took few extra weeks longer than I'd hoped—not because the work was harder, but because I restarted from scratch at least three times. Each restart made the fundamentals more sound. Perfectionism? Maybe.
But here's what struck me: each restart only added a day or two.
In the pre-AI days, tearing something down to the studs and rebuilding would have taken months—unreasonable, totally unfeasible. Which, looking back, probably led to shipping a lot of compromised work. We'd commit to early architectural decisions and live with their consequences because the "cost" of a rebuild was too high.
AI-first workflows changed that equation completely. The grunt work of rewriting thousands of lines of code is gone. What's left is the essential question: "If I could start over, how would I build this better?"
The constraint isn't implementation anymore—it's clarity of vision. And sometimes the fastest path to clarity is through a restart. Now starting over is an option. And often a good one.
