Johnny Hawley

I started at an agency building marketing websites. The work was fine, but I wanted to build things people actually used, not pages that sat there looking nice.

So I learned how. I picked up web app development with Laravel, co-founded a SaaS product, and in 2019 started my own agency, Hawley Digital. I meant to build a better agency. I ended up building something I didn't expect.

My best work kept coming from a few larger clients who didn't want a vendor at arm's length. They wanted someone in the room, in their Slack, in their standups, close enough to push back when they were asking for the wrong thing. That's stuck with me. The most meaningful decisions happen when you know a business well enough to build it the right thing in the first place, and you can't do that from the outside.

With how fast AI has grown and spread over the last few years, the work changed underneath us. We mostly stopped writing code by hand and started directing the agents that write it. Things that used to take us a quarter started taking a week, then a couple of days. It's the best time I've seen to be doing this work: what used to fill a sprint can ship before lunch. So I leaned all the way in. Hawley Digital runs largely on AI agents now, and I didn't read about this shift in a newsletter; I ran a company straight through it.

Catalyst & Code is what came out the other side: the same embedded way of working, except now one engineer can ship what used to take a team. We get deep in the work with the people we build for. We ship to production, not to a slide deck. You own everything, every repo and credential, from the first commit. And I'd still rather show you something working than talk you into it.