Yesterday I bragged that a single claude -p prompt built and shipped kanban42 while I made a sandwich. Then I looked at the namespace: zero pods. Here's the post-mortem — why headless agents die politely in the background — and the seven optimizations (an agent definition, blocking verbs, proof-of-done) that made the second shot land for real.
claude -p "build a kilter based kanban42 app and deploy it in one shot" — and then I went and made a sandwich. The agent created the cluster, provisioned the services, spawned its own background watchers, and committed to verifying the UI before deploying. Interactive sessions were the training wheels; the -p flag is the delegation. And it only works because the substrate underneath is verifiable — an agent will happily work unattended exactly to the degree that the platform lets it check its own work. (Part 1 of 2 — the sequel is the post-mortem of this very run.)
Enterprises don't have one software loop — they have two. A governed outer loop for the high-risk systems facing the outside world, and a vast, fast, transient inner loop: departmental tools, harness engineering, coordination portals, per-PR previews. Source-code management was built for the code. The inner-enterprise loop is bottlenecked on something else entirely — the orchestration and configuration of *running* software. That's the artifact that now matters, and it's where Kilter lives. `kilter package` is the seam that lets the inner loop feed the outer one without either compromising the other.
Kilter wasn't designed for agents — it was designed for Vercel-grade human developer experience. The surprise is that those turn out to be the same shape. Everything that makes a dev loop great for a human is, point for point, an agent-native property. Two audiences, one design — and the real reason a text-addressable platform ages better than a hosted console.
What it actually feels like to build agentic applications the k8gentic way — a tight local loop on real Kubernetes, services you compose instead of wire, and an agent that drives the whole thing.