If you're a senior responsible engineer, then autonomy should not be a negative role in your development process. That said there is value in
otherwise you will end up with a spaghetti western "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly." If you're a prolific coder like Stallman, you might pull this off. If you're just a hack then this is a license to write unmaintainable code that can't adjust to changes in requirements.
I have occassionally cowboy coded to see
Mostly I do CC on challenges like codefights.com, and 'trivial' work like translating MIPS optimizing compiler in C++ from its original pascal.