AI Put Me on a Pedestal. Then I Looked Down

The second is mockups. The first draft was never right. Basic, no linking, no flow. Then the slow part, driving it screen by screen, taking screenshots, pasting them back, saying fix this. Which is where the third one bites, and it wore me down most: give it ten problems and it fixes five. The rest wait for another pass.

There were sharper moments. One Claude release invented so many methods that did not exist that I sat there swearing at the screen, and eventually stopped for two weeks rather than keep paying to argue with it. I could not tell you which version, so I will not name one.

My favourite failure is my own fault, and it maps straight onto Lieberman's idea of treating context as code. My framework lives in a hidden folder that is also in the ignore list, and search tools skip both. So agents kept reporting that framework files were "not present anywhere in this tree" while the files sat right there. That would be a footnote, except the false statement got written into TfLens's own requirements document as fact, a requirement was stamped not verifiable, and every figure in the app became unquotable. A search tool default closed an acceptance gate. I had never checked whether my context was readable.

The framework, and what it grew into

Through early 2026 I rebuilt BMAD into something of my own. On 12 June I audited it, fixed thirty seven problems and stripped out every stock agent, task and template. The next day I renamed it TechieFlow.

The idea is one I would still defend: one person who knows the domain drives the product, the AI does the work, and the person reviews every output.

Lieberman describes earned autonomy as a progression, from observing, to suggesting, to acting with approval, to acting alone. I can show you what happens when you skip a step by accident. My framework has a mode that suppresses confirmation prompts for unattended runs. A script turned it on and nothing turned it off, on any exit path, including the dry run. Five repositories sat in that state, one for six days, with delete prompts silently suppressed. Autonomy was not earned. It leaked.

Later I made a team edition, the AI-First Playbook, which reached npm before TechieFlow did, because publishing my own framework had not occurred to me.

Then the thing grew. Every rule I hit twice became a paragraph, the paragraphs became documents, and the documents got loaded into every session. The tooling meant to speed me up was slowing me down.