The Agent That Saved My Brain

Austin Tedesco, Every’s head of growth, describes building “Montaigne” — a Claude Code agent that connects to Stripe, PostHog, Slack, Notion, Figma, email, and calendar. The agent handles the context-switching that was consuming his cognitive capacity: pulling data across dozens of surfaces, analyzing it, and distilling it into actionable plans.

Tedesco, who has no technical background, spent three weeks playing with Claude Code on personal projects (a cooking app, an indie movie theater finder) before applying those skills to his growth role. The key insight: the agent’s value is not just speed but preserving mental energy for high-judgment decisions.

He open-sourced the compound knowledge plugin that powers part of the system, inspired by Kieran Klaassen’s compound engineering framework. The piece is paywalled after the setup, promising details on avoiding the AI setup procrastination trap and practical architecture decisions.

RDCO mapping: Directly mirrors our own COO agent architecture — an always-on agent connected to multiple data sources, handling the administrative overhead so the human can focus on judgment calls. Strong reference for compound engineering content and the “agent as colleague” framing.