5M developers reached by Kilo’s open source, model-agnostic platform
No sign-off, spec review, or design review required before shipping
Agent pipeline plans, reviews, and fixes while engineers sleep, ready by morning
Emilie Schario, Vice President of Engineering at Anaconda, describes the old shape of software development as a funnel: planning, research, and prototyping at the wide end, engineering at the narrow one. Because engineering time was the expensive and scarce step, work had to clear specs, design reviews, and sign-off before anyone wrote code. The point of all that review was to avoid spending engineering capacity on the wrong thing.”It is just as expensive to spend time on software engineering as it is on planning,” she says. “Coding is free. You can now ship code at the speed of thought.”
AI made writing code cheap, so the economics that justified the funnel no longer hold. Kilo rebuilt its process without it. Planning didn’t disappear at Kilo. It moved: into written principles engineers apply on their own, and into the building itself, where shipping a real feature produces better information than a spec or a mockup would. That is the premise behind Kilo’s operating model, and behind what fifteen engineers have shipped: an open source, model-agnostic agentic platform now used by more than five million developers across VS Code, JetBrains, web, and CLI.
Shipping as Research
Schario’s case for cutting the review layer starts with what upfront design was for. Teams wrote detailed specs because the alternative, building the thing and watching people use it, cost too much to serve as research. “We used to rely on feedback coming from prototypes and mockups. Now we can actually just build it, and get real product feedback. The best signal you can get is not what people say when they’re reacting to a prototype. It’s what they actually do when it’s in the wild.”
Asked how she balances speed against product quality, she rejects the premise. “They’re not incongruent. It’s not a thing you have to balance. Going fast is an enabler for making the best product, because the sooner we get an MVP out the door, the sooner we get feedback from users.”
Principles Instead of Approvals
Kilo replaced those gates with a written set of product principles, specific enough that an engineer can settle a question on their own instead of sending it up for a manager’s decision.
Schario points to Igor Scekic, a staff software engineer who owns Kilo’s mobile app, as the example. “We’ve done an incredible job of pushing decisions down,” Schario says. “Igor knows the principles, what we prioritize, where we’re going. I don’t need to be involved in every step. We’re not playing telephone. We’re not asking for sign-off.”
One principle holds that Kilo optimizes for the individual developer’s experience, including in team and enterprise contexts where the individual isn’t the buyer. So when a request from leadership would come at the user’s expense, the engineer doesn’t have to escalate it. “That’s a normal decision that would be escalated up in an org. But we have this principle. You could use this principle to make the decision.”
The first Kilo value is ownership: take responsibility for outcomes rather than tasks, treat anything broken, unclear, or slow as yours to fix, and understand that “someone should do this” usually means you.
What That Looks Like for One Engineer
Scekic owns the Kilo mobile app and browser extension, responsible for 95% of the work on both. “If you need a decision, you get it in Slack in five minutes,” he says. “Or you don’t even need a decision, because you know that you want to build something.”
A Discord user recently asked to lock the app behind biometrics, because their kids were spending their credits. Scekic decided it made sense and started building it that day. Biometric unlock is now in beta, Schario among those using it.
He builds with a pipeline of agents, driven from the mobile app. A frontier model handles the initial approach. From there it is all Kilo: a planner agent drafts a detailed plan, a cheaper reviewer agent adversarially critiques and approves it, and a cheaper implementer executes. Each section passes one to three review rounds.
Then comes the step Scekic considers most important. “The agent needs to run it locally and prove that it works. It has instructions to make screenshots or screen recordings that prove what it built actually works.”
Then the agent opens a pull request. Kilo Code Reviewer examines it in full and a fixer bot resolves the remarks. When Kilobot has nothing left, the PR gets a “human-ready” label and Scekic reviews the code and the proof.
Pairing a much cheaper model with an adversarial reviewer, he says, gets close to state-of-the-art quality at a fraction of the cost. The tradeoff is elapsed time. “I leave it overnight, sleep, wake up, and there’s a bunch of PRs, all human-ready, all waiting.”
Build Once, Recycle
Throughput also comes from architecture. New features ship into Kilo’s core first, then cascade outward: to the CLI, then the VS Code and JetBrains extensions, then Cloud Agents, and then to the tools built on Cloud Agents, including Kilo Code Reviewer, Kilo Security Agent, and Kilo Bot.
The point, Schario says, is to build once and recycle a lot.
Leadership stays close to the work. Schario runs an organization of roughly thirty people and still ships code.
Controls Moved Into the Work
Building a feature used to take weeks, so an approval process existed to make sure those weeks weren’t spent on the wrong thing. When a feature can be built overnight, the calculation changes. What goes away is the wait to begin, not the review of what gets merged.
Kilo’s controls moved into the work. Principles enable engineers to settle decisions that they used to escalate. Agents run the review rounds. An agent has to prove a feature works before a human sees the pull request. No one writes a spec, schedules a design review, or waits on a manager’s sign-off before starting.
Kilo built its dev factory in house. Kilo is open source, model-agnostic, and free to try. Explore Kilo.
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