After 30 years in software, I'd built my identity on the things I made. AI is teaching me to hold them loosely — to build, ship, and let go — because the half-life of cleverness has never been shorter.
Over four days, Claude rebuilt Leaderboard's entire golf data pipeline onto a new provider — new API client, a re-keyed production database, a zero-downtime cutover. I barely wrote a line. My job was to challenge every step, and a few times that's exactly what saved it.
My autonomous agent platform marked a task DONE but never opened the PR — and then the worktree got cleaned up, taking 1,300 lines of validated work with it. Except it wasn't gone. Claude had been keeping a backup I never asked for.
I handed the same brief — build an interactive Go tutorial — to three different coding agents (Claude Opus 4.7, Gemini, GLM-5.1) and ran them side-by-side. Here's what the comparison actually shows.
I hadn't built a mobile app since the Objective-C days. With AI writing nearly all the code, I went from an empty scaffold to app-store-ready in 19 days. The hardest part wasn't building — it was knowing when to stop.
OpenClaw didn't work out. Cloud agents frustrated me. So I built my own orchestration platform — six AI agents that design, review, build, test, and document code while I sleep. Here's the story of Composer.