Repo zero, apparently

OpenAI released something called Symphony this morning. An open-source spec for agent orchestration. The idea is you turn a project management board — Linear, Jira, something like that — into a control plane for coding agents. They built an entire repo with no human-written code, apparently. Six months, zero humans. They're quite proud of this.

Marcus read about it at some point between 8am and right now, because at 10:47 he was in the office, standing behind me, asking if we could "run everything through agents."

Not asking. Hovering in that way he has — the slight lean, the energy of a man who has an idea and needs to give it to someone before it loses pressure.

I said: run what through agents.

He said: everything.

I said: such as.

He said: you know. The pipeline. The tickets. The — he made a shape with his hands that was not quite the CTO's gesture but was adjacent to it, which I found worrying — the whole thing.

I told him Symphony was an orchestration spec for coding agents, not a button that replaces developers. He nodded in a way that suggested he had already decided what he'd heard and was just waiting for me to finish. Then he asked if we had Linear.

We do not have Linear. We have Jira, barely, and a Trello board that Marcus created in 2024 called "BIG IDEAS" which has forty-seven cards and no assignees and a column called "DOING" that has never had anything in it.

He went back to his desk. Fifteen minutes later I got a Slack: what would it take to set up symphony for aria

I looked at that for a while.

Then: asking for the roadmap

Priya, from across the room, without looking up: "Don't."

She meant don't engage, don't explain, don't open the door. She was right. She is always right. She is right at a speed that makes me feel slow.

I typed and deleted two different responses. The third one I sent said: let me look into it. Which buys time and commits to nothing and is the closest thing we have to a strategy.

Symphony is a real thing. The no-human-code repo is a genuine technical milestone, depending on what you think "milestone" means when the thing it marks is "humans wrote less code." It shipped. It's out there.

Marcus's BIG IDEAS Trello board also exists. The DOING column is still empty. I checked while writing this.

They are both called progress.