Ryan Scanlon on tracking AI work across projects
Ryan Scanlon, founder and engineer at Malleable, describes a central kanban for coordinating AI-assisted projects and keeping a record of tickets, commits and time. The conversation looks at where AI helps in his work, why email triage did not, and what businesses should prioritize as building gets easier.
AI can accelerate code production, but teams still need a reliable record of work across agents and projects. Scanlon advises focusing on fewer, more specialized tools and investing in audience and customer engagement rather than treating building alone as a moat.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
Malleable was formed because, at the time (Nov 2025), there wasn’t many general agents out there. On top of that, there wasn’t yet a business application for turning agents loose on projects, and no paper trail. Now, late 2026, general agents run rampant and there’s still not a way to reliably track all that they do. That’s changed – Malleable now exists as a central triage point, an automated kanban, where a technical lead can connect claude code, a CEO can work in a Chat GPT browser conversation, and a central kanban holds every project in 5 stages. Filter it by bucket, and you can see specific clients, subprojects, and initiatives, active teammate deepwork timers, and a sober ticket github, and time-commitment history of everything that’s went into a specific bucket.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Most business comes from word of mouth and blog referrals right now. I desire it to come from agile teams that want to ship quickly across a large number of projects and buckets.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
One thing I handed to AI is code production. It was the first thing it was good at, and running a solo dev agency it’s absolutely necessary. I run an SEO shop as well and email triage hasn’t been the most effective for this use case.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
Yes, as a marketing consultant I’ve had success landing in AI search like ChatGPT, but would like to expand to receive more website hits that I’m getting. Malleable is definitely not full time commitment, but I use it’s current infrastructure throughout every day to track time, align to a commit & ticket history.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Jensen Huang said the best positioned are the minds that know how to think around the corner. The next big need. I would tell them to double down on a smaller number of tools, increase specialization, and realize building is not a moat anymore. Marketing, audience, and your relentless ability to keep people engaged is the only moat now. And regulatory/legal hoops, SOC2, HIPPA are big ones that mean a lot to some clients, but it all depends on your ICP. If you spend thousands on SOC2 and your ideal customer doesn’t care about data, your effort is misaligned.
Thank you to Ryan Scanlon and the team at Malleable for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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