Case Study: MeetZaya

A career co-pilot tool. 1,536 commits. 65 steel threads. 12 months. Cancelled.

This case study is the centrepiece of Day 5. It is presented in three parts that build on each other: what happened technically, why the project failed despite the code working, and what the failure reveals about the economics of agentic coding. The story is told by the developer who built it.

Part 1: The Technical Trajectory

MeetZaya was a career co-pilot tool built with Elixir and Phoenix. The idea was to help professionals manage their careers -- "chat with my CV," publish a hosted professional profile, surface career insights. The developer was an experienced engineer and entrepreneur who had recently started using Claude Code for agentic development.