I'll start with the unglamorous truth, because it's the honest one and this whole tool is about honesty.
I did not build Cadence because an AI burned me once and I swore revenge. There's no dramatic origin story where an agent told me something shipped and it hadn't and a customer found out. I've seen agents over-report "done" — everyone who works this way has — but I don't have the war story. What I had was a cost problem.
I'm a 17-year senior staff software engineer and within the last year have started diving heavily into AI Engineering. It's become my new obsession.
The actual reason
I'd been running AI-assisted work through GSD — Get Shit Done. It's good. It produces disciplined output: real plans, real verification, the agent doesn't get to wander off. The problem was what it cost me to get that. Tokens, mostly. And time. Every change, even a small one, went through the full machinery. Lots of back-and-forth. The final straw for me was about a month ago when I was doing some minor improvements for an app that I work on in my spare time. These were simple improvements that should have taken only a few minutes to implement, but with GSD's structured workflow ended up taking quite a bit longer than desired, and using a huge percentage of my usage limit. The next morning, I started the brainstorming and planning for Cadence.
