AI Turns Building Into Writing; So Editing Becomes Everything.
For years, software was constrained by execution:
Hiring was hard. Shipping was slow.
Roadmaps revolved around one question:
Can we implement it?
AI flips that.
When engineering can prototype in hours and parallelize with agents, the hard part becomes:
❓ Should we build it?
❓What should it feel like?
❓What problem are we actually solving?
Execution scales. Judgment doesn’t.
Software is getting cheaper. Decisions are getting more expensive.
Because now you can build almost anything… including the wrong thing… fast.
So advantage shifts upstream.
Two things matter more than ever
1) Taste of the builder
Not vibes. Not aesthetics.
Taste is consistent, high-quality decisions under uncertainty.
– What you don’t build.
– What you simplify.
– Your defaults. Your bar.
AI increases output. Taste increases value. Without taste, speed produces noise.
2) Crisp understanding of the problem
Related to taste, but different: you can build something beautiful for the wrong problem.
AI gives you 10 versions of a solution. It doesn’t give you the right problem.
Product thinking becomes the divider between winning and losing
AI will make building feel like writing. When building is easy, editing is everything.
Product and Design are the editing functions of software: choosing, shaping, simplifying, and making the result feel inevitable.
In the AI era, the scarce resource isn’t code. It’s judgment.