I Spent a Year Building an Agency With AI. I Still Don't Know What to Call Myself.

A year ago I went all in. I left the safety of a job title that made sense on a resume and started building Untold.works, a digital agency in Mexico serving clients across the US and Latin America. The pitch was simple: I would build websites, run ads, handle SEO, create brands, and ship everything faster than a traditional agency because I was using AI at every layer of the process.

What I did not anticipate was the identity crisis.

The Title Problem

People ask me what I do. I never know what to say.

Developer? I build full-stack web products in Next.js, React, and TypeScript every day. But I also design logos in Canva, write ad copy in two languages, and set up conversion tracking in GTM. No developer I know does that.

Designer? I create brand systems, choose typefaces, and obsess over spacing. But I also write MCP servers, configure CI/CD pipelines, and deploy to Netlify and Vercel. No designer I know does that either.

Marketer? I run paid campaigns across Google, Meta, LinkedIn, and TikTok. I do SEO audits and build programmatic landing pages. But I also write the code those pages run on and design the visuals that go on them. That is not a marketer.

The honest answer is I do all of it. Every day. And the reason that is possible is not because I am some kind of genius. It is because the tools changed.

What a Monday Actually Looks Like

Here is a real day from last month. I woke up, reviewed a client's GA4 data, adjusted their Google Ads bidding strategy, then opened VS Code and spent two hours building a new service page in Next.js. After lunch I jumped into Canva to design social posts for a product launch, wrote the copy for those posts in English and Spanish, then used Claude Code to automate the client's lead notification workflow. Before closing my laptop I deployed the site update and scheduled the social content.

That is six different disciplines. It used to require six different people. Or at minimum, a developer, a designer, a media buyer, a copywriter, and a project manager to keep them all from stepping on each other.

I did it between breakfast and dinner, and I did not rush. The AI tooling I use every day — Claude Code, browser automation, MCP servers, scheduled tasks, Canva's AI features — is not replacing my thinking. It is removing the friction between thinking and doing. The gap between having an idea and shipping it has collapsed.

The Roles That Did Not Exist Two Years Ago

I have been paying attention to what other people in this space call themselves, and no one has settled on a name yet. That is actually the point. The role is new. Here are the three labels I keep seeing:

AI-Augmented Creative Technologist. This one captures the cross-disciplinary reality. You use AI tools as force multipliers across the entire stack, from design to deploy to demand gen. It is accurate but it sounds like something you would see on a conference badge and immediately forget.

One-Person Agency Operator. This one resonates with me because it describes the business model, not just the skill set. You deliver what used to take a ten-person team. Dev, design, copy, ads, SEO, prospecting. The economics are different, and the speed is different, because the tools are different.

Vibe Coder. Vibe Builder. This term is gaining traction for people who use AI to build at speed across disciplines. It is less formal, more cultural. It captures the energy of the workflow even if it does not explain the substance.

None of these are perfect. But they are closer to the truth than "web developer" or "digital marketer" or "freelance designer." Those titles describe a single lane. The thing that AI tooling enables is not staying in one lane. It is moving fluidly across all of them, because the cost of switching contexts has dropped to almost zero.

What This Means for Untold.works

When I started the agency, I positioned it as "we build websites." That was wrong. Not because we do not build websites, but because that framing undersells what actually happens.

What we do is build your entire digital presence. Website, brand, content, ads, SEO, automation. End to end. And we do it faster than a traditional agency because we work differently. We are not coordinating between five departments. We are one operator moving through the full stack with AI as a force multiplier at every step.

That is the real pitch for Untold.works. Not "we make websites" but "we build your digital presence end to end, faster than any traditional agency, because we work with AI at every layer."

The Uncomfortable Truth

The struggle I have been feeling, the "what do I call myself" problem, is not actually a problem. It is a signal. Traditional job titles were designed for an era when tools were specialized and expensive and you spent years mastering one of them. That era is ending.

The people who will define the next decade of digital work are not specialists. They are builders who move across disciplines, who use AI to collapse the distance between idea and execution, and who ship whole products instead of components.

If you are reading this and you feel the same tension, if your LinkedIn title does not capture what you actually do, if people ask "so you are a developer?" and the answer is "sort of, but also not really," welcome to the club. The role does not have a clean name yet because we are still building it.

And honestly, that is the most exciting part.

Joshua is the founder of Untold Works, a creative technology agency in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.