Rick Blalock is a co-founder of Agentuity, which builds an agent-native cloud for autonomous software that maintains context, coordinates with other agents, and operates beyond conventional serverless limits. His earlier career included mobile developer infrastructure, founding a fisheries-technology company, product leadership after its acquisition, and building AI systems for qualitative customer research.
From mobile platforms to autonomous agents
Blalock worked on the mobile developer platform Appcelerator alongside future Agentuity co-founder Jeff Haynie, pursued cloud work at IBM, and later became a principal engineer at Pinpoint. His public software projects include Titanium and Node.js tooling and an IBM Watson-powered museum-guide prototype.
In 2011, Blalock and Albrey Arrington founded Fish Rules, a mobile application translating location-specific fishing regulations into practical guidance for anglers. Fishbrain acquired Fish Rules in 2021, and Blalock subsequently served as Fishbrain’s chief product officer. He also co-authored a 2023 fisheries study examining offshore wind development using recreational-fishing application data.
Blalock later co-founded OneStudy with Kincy Clark to develop AI-assisted qualitative research. Its agents exposed a persistent infrastructure problem: synthesizing customer interviews and other extended work could exceed serverless execution windows. In early 2025, he co-founded Agentuity with Haynie, Matthew Congrove, Robin Diddams, and Bobby Christopher; the company launched with $4 million in seed funding.
Long-running, stateful agent infrastructure. Blalock treats agents as infrastructure-level entities requiring durable execution, memory, inter-agent communication, independent routing, access controls, and configurable email, API, or scheduled triggers. His deployment demonstration shows Bun, Node.js, and Python interoperability, framework-agnostic development, cost visibility, and a crucial distinction between traces readable by human operators and observability agents can use to assess themselves.
Agent-native organizational design. Blalock argues that autonomous systems should participate directly in product development, documentation, marketing, and operations, while people retain judgment, approvals, and consequential decisions. His organizational-design writing connects that model to flatter teams, redesigned onboarding, and hiring for practical AI fluency; Agentuity uses Cognition’s Devin as an external coding product.
Persistent engineering context. Blalock wants requirements, design conversations, and implementation decisions to remain available to both engineers and coding agents instead of disappearing between meetings, tickets, and pull requests. His work on conversations and code applies that principle across GitHub, Slack, Linear, automated documentation, and software review.
Omakase Agent and verifiable agent craftsmanship. His Omakase Agent framework combines specialized execution, independent critique, documented decisions, project preferences, and explicit verification. Agents can act autonomously within an approved scope, while consequential actions remain subject to human authorization.
Long-running, stateful agents need more than an HTTP endpoint. Rick Blalock walks through project creation, local tracing, deployment and channel routing—and a deployed invocation that fails.
When agents do the routine work, employees spend more time directing and reviewing it—and the consequences reach into team structure, hiring, and onboarding.
