Your Code Is Trash Anyway—And That's the Whole Point

Short, sharp take on why specs beat prompts, models rewrite everything anyway, and product teams that store decisions—not code—are the ones who win.

Your code is going to be rewritten anyway. Models regenerate it. The next engineer rewrites it. Six months from now, nobody remembers why any decision was made. So why are you treating the code as the artifact?

This episode reframes how product teams should think about AI-generated output. The real leverage is in the spec, the decision, the reasoning — not the code itself. Slowest layer wins. Store the why, not the what.

Three moves you can apply this week

1. Every PR links to a decision, not a Jira card. One paragraph explaining why this code exists.
2. Review the spec, not the code. The code is now free. The expensive thing is the human judgment behind it.
3. Store reasoning where it's searchable. Six months from now, "read the code" is already a failure.

Where to find more

• Growth Alchemy Lab — short, opinionated takes on AI in product work, published every Monday.
• Contextually Aware — frameworks, code, and conversations with teams shipping AI products in the messy middle.

Send this to the person on your team who's still arguing about code review nits while the spec is the bottleneck.