Two weeks of learning at SageOx
I am currently a rising junior at Lake Washington High School, and I've recently discovered a curiosity for how AI is reshaping the way people work. I've always leaned more on the technical side — writing code, building things — but I also have a real appreciation for entrepreneurship, so when I was offered the chance to learn at SageOx this summer under Milkana Brace, SageOx's Founder and CPO, I didn't hesitate. It meant finally seeing the product, customer feedback, and design side of a tech company, instead of just the engineering side I was familiar with.
I've been following SageOx's journey since its earliest days. I've attended several of the company's hosted events along the way, like the AI House event with Steve Yegge, Ajit Banerjee, SageOx's Founder and CEO, and Milkana Brace, and AI Tinkerers Seattle's Demo Night. I didn't need the $15 million seed round to tell me this team was onto something. They're building an idea that's going to change the future of how teams work. I am super excited to continue following their journey and see what they do next.
What I worked on
SageOx builds tooling and a shared memory for human-agent teams. This means that context travels with everyone, human or agent, instead of getting lost between meetings, tools, or isolated coding sessions, so no one gets left behind while the team keeps moving fast. This summer that meant three things: auditing the company website and getting to implement some of what I flagged, sitting in on design meetings and having a real voice in conversations about where SageOx is headed, and learning what it actually means to work alongside AI agents rather than just pointing them at a task and hoping for the best.
The team
One of my favorite parts of the culture at SageOx is Merge Wall, a daily morning meeting where everyone shares what they're working on, hears where everyone else stands, asks for help, and gets unblocked. It sounds small, but it keeps the team connected and gives everyone a real read on how the group is doing.
On Fridays, that same slot of time turns into something even more special: Constellation. It's the same daily-update ritual, opened up to the wider circle of people who orbit SageOx's core team. These guest stars could be friends, builders, or advisors, invited in that week. They get the opportunity to watch the team in its natural habitat, unfiltered. That's what makes Constellation work; the feedback they provide comes back real instead of polite, often catching an assumption the team stopped noticing had gone stale.
What struck me most was how well this small team's strengths interlock instead of overlap. Disagreements happen constantly but rarely slow anything down as the team is able to quickly come to a solution since everyone has the same team knowledge and there are no gaps left to bridge. Watching how a team unaffected by a lack of context resolved conflict that cleanly showed me how what SageOx provides teams really is the future and taught me more about what collaboration means than any class in school ever did.
I'd like to highlight what it's been like working alongside Emory Clark, SageOx's Founding Designer. She's constantly collaborating on projects with people across the SageOx team and she is always open to receiving feedback. Her willingness to pick up a new skill whenever she finds herself blocked is inspiring, and she is never afraid to ask for help when needed. I personally worked on projects alongside her numerous times and always walked away having learned something new from how she approaches a problem. I can say with confidence that SageOx is lucky to have her on the team.
I also had the opportunity to work with Madhur Shrimal, one of SageOx's newest engineers. He recently wrote about the work trial that convinced him to join SageOx full-time, and one of his takeaways from that article proved especially true during my time here as well. This team doesn't just build SageOx, they run their whole day through it. Every meeting and decision feeds back into the same shared memory they're building for customers to use. Since the people building it are depending on it as much as any customer would, the product improves in real time to fit their vision.
Reflections
Going into these two weeks I knew I was going to learn a lot about being in a professional workplace and working alongside these industry experts, but I also learned things I didn't expect. I watched this team resolve conflict quickly by reframing and talking through the confusion instead of getting defensive, and realized that disagreement can actually make a team move faster, not slower. That habit of making sure everyone is on the same page is what lets them move fast without carrying friction into the next meeting.
That same speed showed up in my own work, too. I learned that being new and junior didn't have to mean I was behind, since with the help of my agents I've been able to complete work at a similar pace as my more senior coworkers. In the age of AI, it's so much easier to jump in and meet your coworkers where they are, instead of needing a long time to catch up.
After spending such a fantastic time at SageOx, I've discovered that I'd much rather stay than go back to school this fall. As more of us end up managing entire rosters of AI agents instead of just teammates, keeping everyone coordinated is only going to get harder. I left this experience convinced that SageOx is building exactly what keeps that growing complexity from swallowing a team whole, so that no one, human or agent, gets left behind.
