An agency sells you a team under one contract. I am one developer who directs AI agents. For some jobs the team is plainly the better buy.
A team under one contract: usually an account manager, a designer, a few developers and someone checking the work. You talk to the account manager, and the account manager talks to the people building it.
A good agency has a process and a bench. If a developer leaves or falls ill, somebody else picks the work up and you may never hear about it.
An agency is the better choice when the work needs several people at the same hour: a large build on a fixed date, brand and illustration alongside the code, or round-the-clock support with a rota behind it. I am one person, and I am not a designer.
It is also right when you want one contract to cover design, development and support for years, with the agency deciding who does each part.
You talk to the person doing the work. The person who models the data also writes the security rules, packages the Android build and answers the store reviewer, so nothing gets lost between a brief and a developer.
The team I direct is AI agents rather than staff. They write the code far faster than I can, and I decide what they build, review what comes back and run it before you hear about it. There is no handover between people for a detail to fall through.
The handover assumes I am not available: full IP transfer, and documentation that matches the code.
My side of this rests on the products below. Each one opens, and each date comes from its commit history or my own project records.
A property-trading party game you can play online or around one phone.
First commit.
A live site with the design system and the shell, and no game in it yet.
The rules engine and the computer players.
Online rooms, the lobby and invites committed.
Still being fixed and finished, a month on.
This site, rebuilt from nothing.
Planning and the first design pages.
First commit of the new app. Its message records five defects the automated checks had passed.
The data platform, 38 tables, and three more defects no automated check had seen.
The rebuild took over this address.
Moved to a new host.
The first call is free and lasts thirty minutes. If this route suits your job better than I do, that is what you will hear from me.