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TL;DR
We rebuilt the whole agency around AI. Yes, the WHOLE damn thing. Every team, every process, head to toe. We call it the Factory Rebuild, we're roughly halfway through, and it has been a JOURNEY.
This series is the diary. The wins, the oh shit moments, the stuff we'd grab our past selves by the shoulders and say. So if you’re curious about what going AI AF looks like for a business, buckle up ‘cause have we got a story for you! Spoiler: Despite some bumps in the road and sleepless nights - we’d do it again in a heartbeat! (Our COO is still silently rocking in a corner, but pinky promise she signed off on that statement)
Binge the conversation + content here:
It started with a renewal notice
A piece of software our whole team uses all day, every day, tripled its price. Overnight. New number, tight deadline, take it or leave it.
Let’s just set the scene real quick. For 17 years we've had the actual dream job: building software that changes millions of lives for the better, with clients we still pinch ourselves over. Blood donation apps with the American Red Cross. The official app for Glastonbury. Tools that flag polluted water before someone swims in it with Surfers Against Sewage.
Our own internal tools though? Rented, like most businesses. You use what's out there, you live with the quirks, and you ask for that one missing feature at every single renewal only to be totally ghosted. Ours was more colours. That's it. That's the feature. We asked for YEARS, and if you've never tried to see fifty people's work at a glance through eight measly colours, consider yourself #blessed, because those eight little colours will kill you softly.
So the price hike hits. Normally that's the whole story: complain, pay, move on.
Except, a few months before this, our Founder and CEO, Duncan, had fallen deep down the twitter rabbit hole on the new AI models. Classic CEO energy. But he didn't stay scrolling. He got hands-on, building things late into the night, seeing for himself what they could actually do.
"The world actually changed in December 2025. It's just a case of when people start using it, unlocking it and understanding it." Duncan Cook, Founder and CEO, 3 Sided Cube
So instead of paying the new number, he built our own version. On holiday. Up until 3am most nights (Dunc definitely owes his wife a makeup vaycay). A week later: working prototype.
That’s when it got interesting. Duncan showed it to Jess, our Head of Delivery, who started asking him for tweaks. Then she got tired of asking and just made the changes herself.
Jess is not a developer. Jess was now building software. And the colours? As many as her little heart desires. Jess was one happy camper.
The rules of software development had been rewritten, and once we'd seen it, we couldn't unsee it. We could keep building life-changing things for our clients AND finally build for ourselves. Everything. At the same time.
Shit was about to get real.
What actually IS the Factory Rebuild?
Wheeling out our marketing one liner: the process of going fully AI native at 3 Sided Cube 🤖
Most businesses use AI like a gadget. Draft an email, summarise a meeting, pop it back in the drawer. Totally fine. Also barely scratching it.
We pulled the models inside the business instead. Into how we scope projects. How we build, test, secure. How the agency actually runs on a random Tuesday.
Why "factory"? Every app we ship is like a car. For 17 years, getting better meant building better cars. This time we're rebuilding the production line itself, because if you fix the factory, everything rolling off it gets better. Not one app, all of them.
"An incremental increase in the model incrementally increases how you operate as a business. That is the big thing people are not yet deeply understanding." Duncan Cook, Founder and CEO, 3 Sided Cube
The bit that made us believers is the fact that these models improve every few weeks. Use one as a gadget, you get a slightly shinier gadget. Build your company around them, and every model upgrade quietly upgrades your whole company while you sleep.
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Okay, but what does "AI native" look like on a Tuesday?
Because let's touch grass, "we're AI native" is the kind of sentence that means absolutely nothing without receipts.
Bet that we came with receipts:
The whole team works with Claude. Same foundation, same guardrails, none of that everyone-on-their-own-random-account chaos.
The business has a memory. 17 years of "we do it that way because of the thing in 2019" used to live entirely in people's heads, where no model could reach it. Now an internal system captures that context and feeds it to the models, so they work with our knowledge instead of guessing. (We'll chat about it plenty across this series. We will not be doing live tours. A girl's got to keep some mystery.)
The roles have gone gloriously fuzzy. Designers are shipping code. Delivery built their own project tooling. Marketing is on GitHub raising pull requests and hard-coding their own pages, a sentence that would've been science fiction here a year ago.
The experts matter MORE, not less. The twist we didn't see coming, and the loudest common thread across every conversation. More people can build now, sure. But nothing ships without a developer who can look at it and go "yep, that'll stand up" or "absolutely not, and here's why." The value moved up: architecture, judgement, taste.
Humans steer. The models do the legwork. The caring about who's on the other end? Still our awesome Cubies.
(We didn't start here, by the way. We started with custom GPTs fixing unsexy internal headaches. Check out that story if you fancy the before photo.)
The bit nobody should skip (but everyone's tempted to)
Your feed is currently wall-to-wall "I built an app in a weekend" posts. And you totes can! We do! It's genuinely brilliant fun.
But a fast vibe coded build and a good product are not the same beast. Everything that made software worth using still has to happen. The scoping. The discover and define. Actually understanding who this is for and what problem it solves. That's the foundation the build stands on, and skipping it because you CAN start building in minute one just gets you a very fast version of the wrong thing.
We wrote a whole piece on this exact trap: AI has made building apps easy, but building great apps is still hard. The build was never the hard part. It's just that now everyone gets to find that out personally.
The hard part (spoiler: it has a pulse)
The models were the easy bit. Real talk.
The hard bit was asking 50-odd humans, some of whom have built software one way for 15 years, to unlearn it. While still shipping client work. To deadline.
"So much of it is the human element. You don't get to skip and leapfrog over that. You have to go through it." Sophie Hardiman, COO, 3 Sided Cube
For our developers especially, things got existential, fast. When writing code is how you've proved your worth for your entire career and the code part gets easier, that's not a workflow tweak. That's a 2am "who even am I now" question. (The answer, for the record: your value moves up. Architecture, ideas, taste ✨)
We tried enthusiasm first. Sharing articles. Explaining the why. Being very, very excited at people. Turns out you can't send someone a hundred links and expect a new brain.
Even Sophie needed more than the links. Duncan had been sending her Twitter threads for months, and she loved them the way you love a postcard from somewhere you're not going: lovely, that, sounds like future-us's problem. It took building for it to land. Which brings us to the single most accurate image of this entire transformation:
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Duncan had been sat in that car for months, engine running, fully Regina George about the future. The rest of the crew? All Cady Heron, clocking one by one that the car was leaving either way. Get in, loser. We're factory rebuilding.
And the wishy-washy "isn't this exciting, maybe, possibly, if you fancy it?" era had to end too, because wishy-washy reads as "this might blow over," and anyone hoping it would blow over just... waited. So the message changed. This is the direction of travel. We can't promise the exact route. But we're going, and the snacks are excellent.
When talking wasn't enough, we reached for constraints. Impossible deadlines. Favourite tools removed.
"If you want to push someone to an absolute extreme, put an extreme constraint on them." Duncan Cook, Founder and CEO, 3 Sided Cube
Brutal-sounding. Worked a charm. Nobody believes the new world exists until they've built something in it with their own hands, and our biggest sceptics stayed sceptical right up to the moment they delivered. Then you could physically watch it click.
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Where we honestly are
Halfway. Maybe. The two people who started this reckon that might be generous.
Bits of it are still a mess, and new ways of working keep spewing up brand new problems, because today's solutions are tomorrow's problems and nobody's handing out certificates at a finish line. There isn't one.
While this is an ever-evolving work in progress - we welcome you on this journey, warts and all 💚
Straight from the Cubes
Over the coming weeks we're sitting down with every team at Cube, on camera, asking what going AI native has actually been like. The triumphs, the flops, the moments someone nearly lobbed a laptop.
We'll keep this list updated as each one drops!
Want to get straight into AI Adoption? Our AI Toolkit's here.
Would we do it all again? In a heartbeat. We'd just bank considerably more sleep first 💤
Disclaimer: We used AI in the process of writing this blog, but a human was still at the centre! We'd be poor advocates for going AI native if we didn't use AI to help write about it. The story is ours, the quotes are our team's own words, and every line got the human pass. AI takes on the legwork so the human energy goes into the creativity, the cadence, and the heart 💚
Published on 31 July 2026, last updated on 31 July 2026