Everyone had written off our legacy KDB batch workflow as non-automatable. The stack was never the problem. I gave an LLM the same lifecycle I use as a developer, one tool per SDLC stage, and the loop closed.
I spent eleven months building an optimal-stopping pairs strategy on crypto. The math worked, the pipeline worked, and the edge turned out to live exactly where it cannot be harvested. On failure, fees, and what survived.
I took a side project I built by hand in 2021 and used AI to turn it into a product-level app in a few days. The speed is not the story; the story is that the prototype had already made every hard decision.