What if you no longer needed anyone else? Two years ago I discovered I could ship real products with no team, no code review and nobody else to blame: just me, with AI as my pair, my team and occasionally my worst enemy. So I gave up my Microsoft MVP and Regional Director awards, sold my consultancy, vanished from the speaking circuit and set out to see how far that would go. Some of what I shipped was genuinely brilliant. Some of it was an unmaintainable shambles I'm still rather embarrassed about, though I'd like to think the gradient runs in the right direction. And the title is only half a joke: one of the ventures in this talk failed, and my co-founder is now fighting in a war partly because it did. Some production outages you don't get to roll back. This is an honest post-mortem of two years spent solo with AI: where two decades of engineering instinct saved me and where it sabotaged me; what I learnt about judgement, loss and which corners one can safely cut; and, by the end, which parts of a team you can genuinely replace with a model, and which parts you will miss far more than you expect. No slides full of best practice, just real stories, real code and the occasional scar.

Target audience: developers, tech leads and engineering managers of any stack who are using (or resisting) AI-assisted development. Level: intermediate; no prior tooling knowledge needed, the lessons are about judgement rather than any specific product.

Format: 45-60 minute session, adaptable to either slot. Story-driven with real code and demos from actual shipped (and abandoned) products; no live-coding dependencies, so nothing to go wrong beyond my dignity. Standard AV only: HDMI and a clicker.

This will be the first public delivery of this talk [or: first conference delivery; a shorter version was road-tested at a London meetup in September 2026].

Speaker background: former Microsoft MVP and Regional Director; previously spoke at Techorama, TechEd, Build, GoogleX, Msft OSS Day, before stepping back from the circuit in 2024 to found and run product businesses. Based in London; happy to travel, no restrictions on recording.