How I actually build now

I'm not a specialist, and I stopped apologising for it a while ago. I came up through startups and events, with a stint in law before any of this, and I taught myself to build along the way. Front-end is where I'm strongest, but I work across the whole thing: product, design, and code. What I'm really good at is seeing what should exist and dragging it into being. For a long time the building was the bottleneck.

It isn't anymore.

The honest truth is that AI closed a lot of the gap between what I could imagine and what I could build. I describe a feature, an agent writes a first pass, I read it, I push back, we go again. It feels less like typing and more like directing. For someone who thinks in products rather than syntax, that's a big deal.

But the interesting part is what didn't change.

Taste didn't get automated. An agent will happily build the wrong thing, beautifully. Deciding what to build, what to cut, and what "good" actually feels like is still entirely on me, and it's still the hardest part of the job.

Context still wins. The agents that help most are the ones that understand the codebase they're in. That's exactly why we pour so much into conventions and a solid CLAUDE.md in Petal Pro. Give an agent that context and it ships. Drop the same agent into a mystery codebase and it guesses.

Shipping still counts more than anything. AI makes the first draft cheap, which just moves the bottleneck to judgment, distribution and follow-through. The stuff that was always the actual work.

So I don't lose sleep over the labels anymore. I build things people use, across the stack and across the business, and I can take an idea from nothing to shipped without waiting on anyone. The tools got sharper and the leverage went up, but the job, figure out what's worth making and then go make it, is the same as it ever was.