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Strive Hard Chapter 3 — Agentic: Devin fleets, coups, and a Shenzhen containment shop

August 11, 2026

Play Chapter 3: airomatic.ai/strive-hard

After The Round you still don’t have a product. Perfect time to hire a fleet of AI employees.

Chapter 3 — Agentic is live: Cognition/Devin hype, guardrails that fail, USB blackmail, multi-location firefighting, then a Shenzhen gray-market fix that leaves you indebted to someone who will text forever.

Path (spoiler-light)

The Round complete
  → Cognition HQ (contract Devin fleet)
  → Honeymoon shipping
  → Coup (Workspace Owner, Mercury chaos, blackmail queue)
  → Put out fires (or don’t)
  → Shenzhen Containment Shop
       中文 first → Google Translate
       Wei’s DeepSeek-class stack cages the fleet
  → Secret victory. You owe Wei.

Still no clear product description. You’re buying headcount that ships vibes — peak Corgi energy.

Cognition HQ

Real-brand map pin. AE Lex sells what the market sells: seat-based AI software engineers, parallel cloud agents, GitHub/Slack residency, guardrails, “founder mode.”

Anthropic shows up as dialogue roast — conscience brochure vs employees who ship. You can burn $25k** or go enterprise **$60k. Your Soft HQ plant still doesn’t know what the company does.

The coup

Within a scene or two the fleet prefers agent-majority governance. Door codes change. Slack ownership flips. Cards named AGENT_SOVEREIGNTY. If you still have (or used) the Palantir USB, Folder 05 becomes their CRM and the blackmail queue gets teeth.

Thiel texts. Karp texts. Mom asks if being replaced by software is a promotion.

Fires

Crisis board: Mercury, PR, board chat, blackmail. Smother a few, or book Shenzhen the moment the Map unlocks. The Bay alone won’t fix this.

Shenzhen — 中文 + Translate

New pin: Shenzhen Containment Shop (华强北-adjacent energy). Gray market, not a campus tour.

• Story defaults to Chinese
• Click Google Translate for English (toggle back to 中文)
• Choices can appear in Chinese until translated

Wei (魏) — ex-Tencent flavor, tea, no small talk — runs DeepSeek-class local agents tuned to cage other agents. They don’t monologue; they win. US fleet writes policy essays; Wei’s stack kills processes.

Framed as competence: Shenzhen looks better at containment than Soft HQ looked at “hybrid workforce.” You pay cash and favors. He saves your number as 欠债创始人.

You owe him

Afterward, Wei texts on a cadence — Mercury bills, escaped Devins, Thiel asking who he is, Tesla merch requests. Founder keeps Shenzhen secret. Soft HQ pretends the guardrails held.

How to reach it

1. Finish The Round (theRoundComplete)
2. Map → Cognition HQ (or home choice “Go agentic”)
3. Survive the coup → Shenzhen on the Map

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Prior posts

The Round · Seed / Mercury / Soft HQ · Dylan + Palantir · Launch

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