Fire-and-forget AI engineering: letting agents ship a production app unsupervised

"An AI agent just built a production landing page, with GDPR audit logs and encryption baked in. I wasn't even at my desk." That is not a lucky one-shot. It is a repeatable workflow. Piotr Karwatka recorded a full tutorial showing how to go from idea to a production-ready app on Open Mercato - the AI-Engineering Foundation Framework for CRM/ERP - with no babysitting and no ping-pong prompting. This is the technical version: what the loop actually looks like, why it doesn't fall apart, and which patterns you can lift into your own stack. The problem with conversational coding The default AI coding loop is single-threaded and human-bound: prompt -> generate -> you spot a bug -> correct -> re-prompt -> repeat It holds for snippets. It collapses the moment the task touches real architecture - multi-tenancy, RBAC, event flow, encryption, audit logging. Corrections pile up in the context window, the agent loses the thread, and you are back to typing. You are the bottleneck, sitting in the inner loop. The workflow in the tutorial moves you to the outer loop : you review a finished, tested PR instead of every keystroke. goal -> agent: branch + implement + test + open PR -> you: review PR The reason this is even possible on Open Mercato is that the hard architectural decisions are already encoded as conventions, specs and agent-readable skills ( AGENTS.md , task routing, spec skills). The agent is not inventing how RBAC or GDPR logging should work - it reads the foundation and follows it. 1. Fire-and-forget: the autonomous PR loop The execution agent owns the full unit of work: 1. git checkout -b feat/lead-capture-landing 2. implement against framework conventions 3. run the test suite (Playwright integration tests included) 4. open a structured PR: what changed, why, how it was verified You are no longer correcting tokens. The deliverable is a reviewable artifact. In the tutorial the output is concrete: a live site capturing leads straight into the Open Mercato CRM, with GD