In 1995, Watts Humphrey handed every developer a personal process.
It failed.
His Personal Software Process (PSP) let a single developer run a defined, measured, continuously improving process. It worked, but the bookkeeping killed it. Time logs, defect logs, forms after every task. Almost nobody could sustain it. Humphrey moved on to team processes, and for thirty years the smallest unit of process design has been the team.
I think that just changed.
Look at what an AI coding assistant actually gives you:
→ Skills: reusable SDLC activities such as analysis, design, testing, review
→ Subagents: roles with responsibilities
→ Hooks: quality gates that run every single time
→ Memory files: your standards, written down
Put these together and you have a full process, with you as its designer.
To be clear, this is not the “army of agents” story. The agents were never the point. The point is that the machine now absorbs the overhead that killed PSP: the constant logging, measuring, and enforcing. Humphrey was right. He was just thirty years early.
I call it the Process of One. It’s what I’m building now.
I’m designing my own process: the activities, the roles, the quality gates, the retrospectives. Everything I once designed for teams, I now design for a team of one. And this time, the machine carries the bookkeeping that defeated Humphrey.
The first rule of AI engineering applies at this level too: if you don’t measure it, you’re guessing. So I hold my own process to the same standard I hold the AI systems I build, and I keep asking: does it actually work?
You are a team of one now, with a process of one. How would you design yours?
Comment:
I’ve also started a catalog of these patterns: 19 so far, researched and organized together with the very assistant they describe. Each one written the same way: the situation, the problem, the solution, the source. Link on GitHub.
Quote:
Nothing that exists in the world is outside of you.
Seek within yourself whatever you want,
for that you are!
Rumi
