Simon Griffiths

I’m 61. I wrote my first line of code at 15. I have a VP-level job, two dogs, a new wife, and a blog I’m somehow managing to post to almost every day.

I’m also building a complete SaaS product.

Quietly. Mostly alone.

A year ago, if I’m honest, I could feel my career entering a different phase. Not burned out. Not irrelevant. But there was a sense that the biggest creative chapters were probably behind me. You make your peace with that.

Then AI agents arrived.

I’ve always been driven by learning. Not learning as duty, but as energy — the satisfaction of understanding something new, of seeing how systems, ideas, and possibilities connect. What AI has given me isn’t just more capability. It has given me that feeling back at full intensity.

Every morning, something feels possible that wasn’t possible yesterday.

Senior people are rarely short of ideas. What we’re short of is execution bandwidth.

You can often see the whole product in your head: the data model, the security boundaries, the workflows, the user experience, the operational model. The difficulty is that building something serious has traditionally required a team, funding, time, and organisational momentum.

So most ideas never happen.

They sit in notebooks. They become “one day” projects. Or you spend two years assembling co-founders, budget, and engineering capacity — by which point the opportunity has usually moved on.

That constraint has changed.

I’m not talking about vibe-coding a demo. I’m talking about a real multi-tenant SaaS platform: authentication, row-level security, auditability, bilingual Welsh and English support from day one, and a RAG interface over legislation and governance documents.

Before I even started the application, I built the serverless framework it runs on, because the foundations mattered. Until recently, that level of engineering ambition would have been unrealistic for one person.

Now it isn’t.

The difference is that I’m no longer working alone in the traditional sense. I’m directing a team of agents.

And I’ve realised that the valuable skill is not prompting. Prompting is only the visible part. The real skill is directing, orchestrating, reviewing, and judging.

Knowing what good looks like. Knowing where complexity matters. Knowing when simplicity matters more. Knowing what not to build.

That is what forty-five years of experience gives you.

AI does not replace that experience. It gives it leverage.

There’s a narrative that says people at my stage of career should feel threatened by this technology. I feel the opposite. I feel as if I have unexpectedly been given a second act.

Not because AI has made the work trivial.

Because it has made ambitious work feel possible again.

And I’m learning something new every single day.

Elvira, my new wife, might reasonably point out that this “new dawn” was supposed to involve slightly less screen time.