Robert TaFounder & CEO, Clarity · Building Hyper-Personalized Agents

The rule every engineer lived by just broke

20 Jul 2026 · 2 min

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In this monologue, Robert Ta argues that the long‑standing engineering principle that "engineering time is extremely expensive" no longer holds. He explains that modern software teams now routinely engage in parallel prototyping, idea generation, and even "unshipping"—the rapid creation and disposal of experimental features. Because code‑generation tools have become practically free, engineers can generate UI and other components on demand to test hypotheses, align stakeholders, and learn without the previous cost constraints. This shift has outpaced many companies' career frameworks, which still describe roles and skill sets based on the old scarcity model. As a result, traditional role definitions are eroding, and teams must adopt new language and structures that reflect the abundant capacity and the need for rapid, low‑cost experimentation.

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If you are in software development, you're on tech team, you're shipping product, you need to be thinking about these things because you're probably doing these things like parallel prototyping, idea generation, killing things, like, you know, unshipping. You're doing these things and you probably are just sort of doing it and now you've drifted off into exercising skills and capabilities to meet the new demand of the capacity of work, of being able to serve your roadmap and your customers because you have more capacity, people could do more, and you've probably drifted away from what the career framework looks like at your company, right? Like, unless they updated it and are thinking about this new language to describe the capabilities and skill sets. It's not even like roles anymore. Like if we think about the archetypes, it's kind of just expressions of the roles in different scenarios to meet the demand of whatever is needed to keep moving the supply of we're baking the bread that is a better software product. What I mean by that is the whole goal before was built around this fundamental assumption that engineering time is very expensive. So we want to measure many times and cut once. Now code generation is practically free compared to what it was a year and a half ago, 2 years ago, right? 3 years ago. And so code generation, we're now finding, is a way to prototype. You could code gen something and you're no longer seeing that as like, oh, that was a super expensive thing. You could generate code to build UI that you have no actual commitment to bring to production, just to get something out there to align on an idea to then get more experimentation and more hypotheses out to get more stakeholder alignment and more learning.