Mark Johnson

I built my last project entirely with Claude Code. I didn’t write a single line of code by hand. It still took me nearly 3 months. Why so long and not a day or week? Because building serious software has never been just about typing code. Early on, there are tons of unknowns. As you build, test, and get feedback, you discover problems and requirements you couldn’t have anticipated. I spent a lot of time reviewing Claude’s work, not line by line, but at a higher level: the approach, architecture, and design decisions. I constantly challenged it, debated its choices, and pushed for simpler, more robust solutions. That’s software engineering. AI helped me bring my vision to life without spending countless hours typing code, wrestling with syntax, searching through documentation, and figuring out the mechanics of how to implement things. Without AI, building this app would have taken me 5-6 months if not longer. As I’ve said over and over, software engineering is not going away but AI is changing _how_ we build software. The tools are changing and the engineer’s role is evolving. And this is why knowing how to build good software still matters. You may not need to remember every API or piece of syntax anymore, but you still need to understand things like separation of concerns, coupling and cohesion, abstractions, data modeling, API design, error handling, security, performance, and testing. When AI proposes an architecture, creates an abstraction, adds another layer, or introduces a dependency, you need enough engineering knowledge to ask: Is this actually necessary? Is there a simpler way? Will this scale? Is this secure? Will this become a maintenance nightmare six months from now? AI can write the code. You still need to know what good code and good software look like.