Lessons from Six Months of Building Production Software with AI Coding Agents

I woke up to forty-seven merge conflicts on a Monday morning. Let me set the scene. The toddler had, by some miracle, slept through the night. The coffee was brewing. The sun was doing that tentative Glasgow thing where it appears for exactly long enough to make you trust it before disappearing behind clouds that seem personally offended by optimism. I opened my laptop with the satisfaction of someone who'd spent the weekend being clever. Two AI agents. Two terminals. Same repository. Parallel progress. Agent 1 handles the authentication refactor, Agent 2 builds the new dashboard endpoint. Monday morning, I review and merge like the productive developer I clearly am. Ship two features before breakfast. Tell my wife I'm basically a genius. Both agents had decided the shared utility module needed updating. Both had done it differently. Both had committed at 2:47 AM — eighteen seconds apart. Three hours of cherry-picking later, I'd recovered maybe eighty percent of the work. The other twe