How I Went from AI Skeptic to AI Advocate in One Year

Summary

William Johnson describes how his view of AI-assisted programming changed after Claude Code consistently produced useful code. When a broken collarbone limited his ability to code by hand, he subscribed to Claude and says his productivity tripled while building his SaaS product ScheduleLord. He still had to steer the system, but says it implemented features, wrote tests, and generated documentation at a quality comparable to his own work. The experience led him to join Shea to build OpenEngine, an open-source software factory intended to automate parts of the software development lifecycle. OpenEngine connects with GitHub and Slack and uses existing subscriptions through ACP. Its workorders are divided into agent nodes for naming, implementation, testing, and review. Five specialized reviewers examine security, bugs and task adherence, performance, conciseness, and code duplication; a reranker prioritizes their findings, while impact analysis classifies changes as green, orange, or red. A human must still approve and merge the pull request, although the team is testing whether green changes can eventually be merged without review. The author says the process caught permission and caching issues in the GitHub integration, including a five-minute window in which revoked access could remain usable. OpenEngine is also exploring evidence collection such as screenshots, videos, staging environments, and documentation to make human review more focused on quality assurance.