I've spent the last two decades helping companies create systems. People development systems for schools. Social media systems for brands like Steinway & Sons, Citibank, and Yeo's. I'm the guy organisations call when they need to turn chaos into a repeatable process.

A few years ago, a friend of mine — a business owner — sold his company for a seven-figure sum. I asked him what the buyers were really paying for. His answer stuck with me: "They wanted to buy my business because I have systems that they didn't have."

That hit hard. As a student of Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline, I've always been an advocate for systems thinking. The learning organisation. Feedback loops. Mental models. I've taught this stuff. I've built it for clients.

But here's the embarrassing truth: I didn't have systems for my own company.

Starting from scratch, every single time

Every new client engagement, every new project — I was starting from a blank page. The proposal template from two projects ago? Buried in some folder. The workflow I built for that workshop? Gone. The content I created for a campaign? Scattered across three platforms and a hard drive I haven't backed up in months.

Even with Fiverr, Upwork, and every Web 2.0 tool available, I couldn't crack it. I tried project management apps, automation platforms, content calendars — none of them stuck. Not because the tools were bad, but because they needed me to maintain them. And when you're a one-person operation juggling delivery, business development, and admin, maintenance is the first thing that falls off the table.

This has been the source of more burnout, anxiety, and — if I'm being honest — episodes of depression than I'd like to admit. Because without systems, I can't replicate what I do. And if I can't replicate, I can't scale. Every month feels like Month One.

Then I opened Antigravity

Google released Antigravity for public preview back in November 2025. Three months later — late February 2026 — I finally gave it a try. For context, I'm not a developer. OpenAI released Codex CLI back in April 2025, and I could never quite figure out how to use it.

Antigravity is what's called an IDE — an Integrated Development Environment. Think of it as a workspace where you write instructions and the AI builds things for you. It's technically a fork of VS Code, which is a popular tool among developers. If you're not a coder, it looks both boring and intimidating. I almost closed the window.

But I didn't. On the night of February 28th, I tried building my first agent — a simple one that could organise files in my Obsidian vault and route tasks to the right place. By 10pm I had the vault set up. By 11pm the AI model was responding. By midnight, I had an assistant that could create and file notes based on simple commands.

"Finally I'm getting this to work," I wrote in my journal at 10:19pm.

"Good to know that this is working," I wrote again at 11:28pm.

By the next morning, I was designing three agentic workflow showcases — one for Microsoft Copilot Studio, one for a workflows agent, and one for Google Workspace. Not because a client asked for it. Because for the first time, I could see the shape of the systems I'd been unable to build for myself.

What this actually means

I'm probably getting ahead of myself. All I really built that first night was a vault, a working AI connection, and the beginning of a task routing system. That's it. No product. No revenue. Just a workspace and a proof of concept.

But sitting here now, I'm both optimistic and excited. For the first time in twenty years of helping other people build systems, I can see a path to building my own — using agentic AI. Not by hiring a team. Not by learning to code. By describing what I need in plain English and letting the machine do the construction.

The systems guy might finally get his systems.