I Asked Claude to Rebuild a 1996 Game. It Didn't Stop There

I've been a senior full-stack engineer for 17 years. I don't know machine learning or biology, but I do know how to keep complex systems from collapsing under their own weight. I remember playing Creatures in 1996 — a game where you raised digital beings with neural networks for brains and biochemistry for emotions. Even as a kid I knew it was doing something other games weren't. Last year I wondered: could Claude rebuild it? If it could, I'd handle the architecture and let Claude handle the sc

How I Let an AI Agent Ship Code Overnight Without Waking Up to a Security Incident

I gave an AI agent root inside a container so it could ship code overnight while I put my kids to bed. Then I almost gave it an escape hatch I didn't see. This is about two things I built: an autonomous orchestrator that ships code unsupervised, and the security work that makes me trust it overnight. The codebase it builds is a complex artificial life simulator — that's a story for another post. TL;DR * I built an autonomous coding agent that ships GitLab MRs while I'm putting my kids to bed