The studio has four employees and only one of them is human. Mochi is the office manager — adopted in July and already territorial about the chair. Kopi is the early code reviewer; he sits on the second monitor and stares at every diff like he's catching the typo I just missed. Susu owns the radiator and considers her job done. Bumi turns up for the morning standup and disappears for the rest of the day.

Working with cats has done two things to my pace. The first is the most obvious — the day has more interruptions. A cat who wants attention is not negotiable. The keyboard becomes a bed. The mouse becomes a toy. The Slack notification becomes the sound of someone judging you for taking your eye off the bowl. You stop more often than you'd plan.

The second is less obvious and more useful: the day has more pauses. A cat sleeping on your forearm is the most honest deadline you will ever meet — you will not finish that ticket, you will sit there, you will look at the wall, and your brain will quietly defrag. Most of my best decisions about a UI started during one of these forced pauses, not during the active typing that bookended it.

I used to think interruptions were the enemy of deep work. The cats taught me to separate interruption from decision-making. The interruption is the cat. The decision-making is what happens while the cat is on you. I stopped treating cat-time as a tax on output and started treating it as the room where the work actually thinks.

The studio is small. The cats outnumber the humans. The bug list still gets shorter every week, and somehow it feels less stressful than the years I worked alone with no fur involved. There is probably a productivity book in this. There is definitely four bowls to fill at five.