Ten principles of a headcount zero company

AI agents run the departments. One human judges. These rules keep it standing.

1. Knowledge lives in repositories, not heads. If it exists only in someone's memory, the company does not own it. Write it down or accept that it can quit.
2. Every role is a brain. A department is a folder: its doctrine, its hard rails, its failure modes, and the work it hands off. Agents operate it. Anyone can audit it.
3. Playbooks, not process docs. Every step states how to run it, how to verify it ran, and how to recover when it fails. A step without a verify is a wish.
4. Code constrains, prose advises. Rules that matter are enforced by software. Advice that helps is written in words. An agent cannot ignore a constraint it physically cannot cross.
5. Propose before apply. Agents start read-only, graduate to proposing changes, and only earn direct writes inside enforced limits. Trust is a ladder, not a default.
6. Write down the why. Decisions without recorded reasons get relitigated forever. The why-log is the most valuable file in the building.
7. Fewer reliable things. Every part you bolt on is another part that can quietly fail, and the failures multiply down the chain. A short system you trust beats a long one you hope about.
8. Sessions end. State survives. Every lesson lands in a file before the day closes. The company must wake up knowing what it learned.
9. The human is the judge, not the bottleneck. Agents carry the volume. The person carries the calls nobody can hand off: direction, taste, and the last gate before anything leaves the building.
10. Never hire what you can codify. And never pretend to codify what still needs a person. Headcount zero is honest about that line and moves it deliberately, one playbook at a time.

Ten is not a finished number. This is what has held so far, and every rule on the list is here because breaking it cost something first.