The job changed

Last week was my last week at Webflow. This week, I’m heading off in a new direction.

I’d started at Webflow last December because it had amazing people working on a good product. My job was to establish a Platform Engineering group to get the company ready for the scale and scrutiny its next chapter looked like it would demand.

Just as I started, agentic engineering really arrived with a roar. I knew the moment was coming. The whole year had been building up to it, but something gelled in the industry at the end of the year, and by January the effect was unmistakable. Model release after model release, alongside constant updates to the agentic harness we’re all using now.

I can’t really point to a single day the job changed. Change came on an accelerating gradient. The arc of where Webflow was heading had shifted, and by April it was more than obvious to me. The restructuring announced in May made it public.

To be clear, I like where Webflow is going. What Webflow had built was an incredibly valuable abstraction that tamed HTML, JavaScript, and CSS into a visual designer that was actually usable. Now, agentic engineering has reached the point where that abstraction is no longer necessary. Webflow is rearchitecting around the source code of a site itself. It’s heady, challenging, exciting stuff.

As the spring turned towards summer, however, something else became clear. I went to Foo Camp in Berkeley, where I spent three days talking deeply with amazing friends, old and new, about AI and personal context, and how these tools can actually benefit the humans using them. And I got so much energy from it that I had to pay attention.

I’ve learned to trust myself when a problem pulls me in. Every time I’ve followed that pull, it has been exactly what I should be doing at that moment. And, to be honest, the smaller, leaner Webflow team doesn’t need three Vice Presidents of Engineering. Sometimes there are too many people in the room, and the right move is to be the one who leaves. Especially when something else is pulling.

So, as compelling as the work at Webflow has been, I’ve decided to take a leap into the unknown to do some research, hack on some things, and possibly agitate for standards and protocols to help agents actually know the people they work for.

This is a moment for builders. May we all find amazing things to build. 🚀