Exoskeletons and Drone Armies: Building Advanced Software in 2026

A modern army does not send a soldier to do everything. The soldier fights in powered armor that makes them stronger and faster. Drones fly overhead and do the surveillance, the supply runs, and the repetitive missions that do not need a human mind. The soldier puts their attention on the one fight in front of them. The drones do the rest.

Building advanced software in 2026 works the same way. Each developer needs two things:

1. An exoskeleton. A customized harness on their own computer, where they direct super intelligent agents through hard, unusual, innovative work that needs their full attention.
2. A drone army. A software factory of agents that does all the work that does not need their attention: dependency updates, fork updates, issue responses, small fixes, documentation, release notes, and everything else that can be automated.

You need both. The exoskeleton without drones leaves you buried in chores. The drones without an exoskeleton leave nobody to do the work that matters.

Attention is the scarce resource

I have written that we are all managers of super intelligence now. Nobody writes or reads code by hand anymore. The question is how many agents you can keep working, and for how long.

The limit is your attention. You can only think hard about one thing at a time. Mitchell Hashimoto, who created Ghostty, said it plainly in My AI Adoption Journey: “Context switching is very expensive.” He turns off agent notifications, because “it was my job as a human to be in control of when I interrupt the agent, not the other way around.”

If you want to build many apps, you cannot split your attention across all of them. You must put it on one hard problem, and let something else handle the rest. That split is the whole design: the exoskeleton is where your attention goes, and the drone army is where it does not.

The exoskeleton

An exoskeleton does not replace the soldier. It amplifies them. Ben Gregory makes this point with a military example: “Soldiers can carry up to 200 pounds, not because the suit replaces them, but because it amplifies what they can already do.”

Andrej Karpathy used a similar image in his Software 3.0 talk: build “Iron Man suits,” not “Iron Man robots.” The human stays the pilot.

In software, the exoskeleton is where you sit and tell an agent, “do this, do that.” It is where you do the work that is new: a protocol nobody has designed, an architecture with no template, a product decision with no precedent. The agent writes and reads all the code. You supply the direction, the judgment, and the taste, one turn at a time.

Three things make a good exoskeleton.

It is yours. An exoskeleton fits one body. Your harness must fit your work: your agents, your skills, your instructions, your scripts, your keybindings. Hashimoto calls the practice “harness engineering”: “anytime you find an agent makes a mistake, you take the time to engineer a solution” so that the mistake does not happen again. Every fix makes the suit fit better.

It reaches every tool. The agent can only act through the tools you give it. A harness that cannot run a command, open a page, or show a result is a suit with no hands.

It shows you everything. You are the pilot, so you must see what the agent did. Code, test output, the running app, a chart, an image, a web page. If you must leave the suit to look at the result, you lose your focus.

TermSurf is my exoskeleton

My exoskeleton is Astrohacker TermSurf. I built it because no other tool did all three of these things for me.

A flexible interface. TermSurf is based on Ghostty, so it has splits, tabs, and fast keyboard navigation. I arrange agent sessions, shells, and browsers in one window, the way the work needs them today.

Every terminal tool. Claude Code, Codex, and Grok Build all run in the terminal. So do Git, compilers, test runners, package managers, and every script I write. A terminal is the one place where all agents and all tools already work.

The web and graphics, inside the terminal. This is the part a normal terminal cannot do. In TermSurf, a pane can become a real Chromium browser. I run the app the agent just built in the pane next to the agent. TermPlot draws interactive charts in a pane, and QuikOpen shows images in a pane. I never switch to another application to see a result.

That is the exoskeleton: agents, tools, and every kind of output in one interface that I customize. My attention stays in one place.

The drone army

Most software work does not need attention. It needs to be done, correctly and on time, and then nobody needs to think about it again.

• Update dependencies.
• Rebase forks on new upstream releases.
• Respond to issues and triage bug reports.
• Implement small fixes and fix small bugs.
• Update documentation when the code changes.
• Write release notes.
• Keep the builds, the tests, and the checks green.

Each of these tasks is small. Together they consume a developer’s week. If you do them yourself, your attention never reaches the hard problem. If you do them in your exoskeleton, you interrupt your own focus.

That is the job of the drone army. It is a software factory: agents that start on a trigger or a schedule, do the work, check it, and report back, with no human in the loop until a decision is necessary.

The idea has many names in 2026. Factory.ai calls its agents Droids, and Latent Space titled its interview with the founders The A-SWE Droid Army. Matan Grinberg says they take on “testing, debugging, refactoring, migrations, all that ugly stuff.” Steve Yegge built Gas Town, an orchestrator that keeps 20 to 30 Claude Code agents working at the same time. GitHub Next is building agentic workflows for triage, documentation, and dependency work. Dan Shapiro’s five levels end at the “dark factory,” named after factories that run with the lights off.

StrongDM took the factory to its limit. Its rules are “Code must not be written by humans” and “Code must not be reviewed by humans.” Its benchmark is “If you haven’t spent at least $1,000 on tokens today per human engineer, your software factory has room for improvement.”

How to build the drone army

A drone that needs you is not a drone. Each drone needs the same things as a long-running agent in the exoskeleton, with one extra rule: it must never ask for your attention unless the decision is truly yours.

Give each drone one job. “Update dependencies and keep the tests green” is a job. “Improve the code” is not. A narrow job has a clear check.

Give it a trigger. A new upstream release, a new issue, a failed build, a merged change, a schedule. The drone starts without you.

Give it a check. Tests, types, builds, a review by a second agent. The drone must prove the work is correct by itself.

Give it a report. The drone tells you what it did and what it needs, in one place, when you choose to look. Hashimoto started his background agents this way: “I would NOT allow agents to respond, I just wanted reports the next day.” Start there, and give the drones more authority as they earn it.

Fix the factory, not the product. When a drone fails, do not do the job yourself. Ask what context, tool, or check was missing, and add it. Then every future drone is better. This is the idea behind The Living Repo: the repository improves the process that improves the repository.

I am building my own drone army now. My monorepo already has many of the parts. Every fork I ship has archived patches and a pinned base, and ah fork outdated lists the forks whose base trails upstream. Every issue records its goal and its experiments, and an issue in automatic mode runs until it is solved. The next step is to connect those parts to triggers, so that the drones start the work and I only see the result.

One pilot, many drones

The two halves of this system do different work.

The exoskeleton is for the work that only you can direct. It is where you think. It is customized, interactive, and always in front of you. One task at a time gets all of your attention.

The drone army is for the work that nobody needs to direct. It is where you do not think. It is automatic, parallel, and out of sight. Many tasks at a time get none of your attention.

The pilot in the suit is the most valuable person in the army. The drones exist so that the pilot never has to leave the fight.

Build your exoskeleton. Fit it to your own work. Then build the drones, one job at a time, until everything that can be automated is automated. What is left is the work only you can do, and all of your attention to do it.