Delete your codebase. All of it. Wipe the repo, kill the backups, watch it disappear.

You feel fine.

You feel fine because you’ve been running an experiment. Every morning, you generate a product from a spec. You ship it. You watch what happens: where users get stuck, what breaks under load, which features nobody touches. You capture everything you learn. Then you delete all the code.

The next morning, you update the spec with yesterday’s learnings and generate the product again. The code is new every day. The spec is thirty days deep.

What have you actually built? The code is no more mature than any other day’s. It was born that morning and will die that night. But the spec has been evolving. Each cycle, it refines. Patterns that caused bugs become constraints. User behaviors become principles. It simplifies where it was overcomplicated, expands where it was too narrow. The spec has become the product. The code is just today’s rendering of it.

This inverts how software has always worked. The old model treated specs as cheap (anyone can write requirements) and implementation as expensive. Skilled labor, debugging, years of technical debt. The spec was a starting point you threw over the wall. The code was the hard-won output.

When models can generate working code, implementation becomes cheap. The skilled work moves to the spec itself: refining it through iteration, encoding learnings, making it precise enough to reliably generate correct output. The spec becomes the endpoint, not the starting point.

So here’s the test: if all your code was deleted tomorrow, would you be okay? Do you have the incantations to regenerate what you lost? If not, you’ve been protecting the shadow and ignoring what casts it.

I find this unsettling. We’ve spent decades treating code as the artifact, the thing you protect and version and accumulate. Calling it disposable feels like heresy.

But the incantation was always the valuable part. The spell, not the sparks it throws off. We just couldn’t see it when casting the spell took years of labor.

Now it doesn’t.