We Built an Autonomous Dev Agent in 16 Hours

At 6:13 AM UTC on March 17th, the first commit landed. By 10:29 PM the same day, we had a fully operational autonomous development agent — designed, built, debugged, and deployed in a single sitting. The project is called MissionControl. It's a Telegram bot that takes coding tasks in plain English, spawns a Claude Code CLI session to do the work, creates a pull request on GitHub, and reports back — all without human intervention. What It Does You send a message to the bot on Telegram: "Add rate limiting to the /api/trades endpoint using a sliding window counter in Redis" MissionControl takes it from there. It creates a feature branch, spawns a Claude Code session with the full project context, streams progress updates back to Telegram in real time, and when the work is done, opens a PR on GitHub. You get a link, review the diff, and merge. The Architecture We went with a ports and adapters pattern from the start — not because we needed it on day one, but because we wanted the system to