When I sold it due to personal reasons I was not yet ready to retire. In that time and especially in Europe buy-outs were quite modest. I started doing consultancy until I would have a new idea and start working on that one. Indeed the golden cage of consulting can be dangerous. I'm already consulting 5 years and didn't start anything new.
I don't consult as a programmer anymore. I implemented Agile in my own company and now I'm an agile coach in large enterprises. Programming I still do in my freetime just to keep me sharp.
But here in Belgium 99% of the projects are CRUD projects so I'm not really missing out on anything. Most of the times senior developers go to architect roles not because they want to stop coding but because they're tired of writing CRUD code.