How We Build Software Now

In 2026, our team has been using Claude Code for a while. Here’s what actually changed.

1. The cost of writing code is so cheap

We prototype and validate ideas much faster than before. We no longer spend hours reading docs, comparing tradeoffs across tech blogs, or writing boilerplate. We just focus on design and user experience now.

2. “AI improves itself” just works

We use a technique where an LLM tests and benchmarks prompts against its own outputs, then we feed the results back: “Here are the results, can you improve the prompt to get better outcomes?” It’s cut our iteration time way down. The approach got a lot of attention after Andrej Karpathy’s “AutoResearch” went viral. It just works.

3. There are no frontend/backend engineers anymore

Our team no longer draws a clear line between frontend and backend. With Claude Code and custom Claude skills, anyone can ship full features without specializing. We still pull in colleagues with deeper expertise when something’s tricky, but one person now builds what used to take two.

Takeaway

We’re still in the early days of figuring out what this means. Implementation stopped being the bottleneck — that part I’m confident about. What comes after that, I genuinely don’t know yet. The fundamentals still matter: system design, data structures, API design. But the job is shifting in ways that’ll take a few more years to understand properly.