Team Tenten,
Over just two short years, our AI-focused media arm has rocketed from 300 readers to well over 200,000. We are now one of the most influential AI voices in the Mandarin-speaking world. Even some of our associates who cannot read the Chinese article we published, but you can feel the momentum—and the responsibility inside our company—that come with that growth.
What the last 16 months have shown us
Generative AI already matches or exceeds human output in illustration, photography, creative copywriting, stock imagery, consulting, and SEO. Instead of hiring separate specialists for every task, our PMs, designers, and marketers have embraced these tools and delivered stronger results, faster, for our clients. That experiment is now a proven competitive advantage.
What the next 6–12 months will bring
This year will be the year of agentic, that we witiness MCP had becoming an Github community hype, and ppl starting to use it to automate their existing business flow trying to make it more automatic by agent.
For example: Agentic coding platforms—think Devin.ai and the next generation of Claude-powered IDEs—are moving far beyond Copilot’s autocomplete. For roughly USD 500/month, a single agent can:
- Detect a QA ticket in Jira
- Spin up a fix branch in GitHub
- Run tests, open a pull request, and notify the PM
- Ship to production once the PM clicks “approve”
Toyota’s digital team is already using this model to replace decade-long web-maintenance retainers. Meanwhile, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon are trimming 5 %+ of their workforce and planning to firing more every year, and also pausing junior-dev hiring. Their message is clear: as LLMs master code and data-driven decision-making, head-count shrinks.
What this means for us
If we don’t retool, clients will soon question why they need a human-heavy agency for dev and maintenance contracts. To stay indispensable, every developer (and frankly, every knowledge worker) at Tenten must learn to:
- Code with AI “vibe” workflows—iterative, conversational, and partially autonomous
- Use advanced environments like Cursor + Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Code
- Design processes that treat AI as the first engineer on the ticket, not the last resort
Why pivoting now creates upside
If we succeed in evolving into a product-first agency—continually building market-ready products for our clients and for ourselves—we unlock real financial headroom. Salaries can grow another 30 %-150 %, because value will flow from scalable products rather than billable hours alone. Achieving that jump means aggressively re-tooling our workflows, validating product-market fit with AI at the core, and embracing the challenge (and excitement) of working in an entirely new way. I can’t wait to collaborate with each of you, make something remarkable, and create some serious buzz.
The path forward
- AI Vibe Coding Workshops – Hands-on sessions start next week. Devs: mandatory. PMs: strongly encouraged.
- Pilot Metrics – We’ll track velocity, quality, and cost-savings on internal and clients’ projects.
- Quarterly Reviews – If adoption lags, I’ll schedule 1-on-1s to unblock issues and reset expectations.
Why I’m optimistic
I came up as a Full-stack developer, and UI/ UX Designer, and in the last month alone I’ve used Claude and Cursor to debug Vercel deployments, refactor a Chrome extension, and ship features in hours instead of days. The leap in capability is real—and exhilarating once you taste it.
Your call to action
Dive in now. Pair with the models, break things, ask questions, share wins. We have a narrow window to turn today’s disruption into tomorrow’s market share. Let’s seize it together—before someone else writes our future for us.
Thank you for your energy, your curiosity, and your readiness to lead.
Erik
Tenten.co