Burj Khalifa out of Lego, half a year later

Imagine you're building Burj Khalifa out of Lego 🧱. A complicated thing, 163 floors. You make a beautiful blueprint, hand it to the team, and they start building.

Half a year later, they've reached floor 13.

And you walk in like: "We need to tear down these walls on the 2nd floor, I made deals with tenants, shops are going here 🏪." It's Lego, not concrete, so why not be flexible? Except your beautiful blueprint is now dead. The new version lands on the sour faces of people who haven't finished the previous one. And you need to earn money now, or you'll die 150 times over before the building is done.

The blueprint lives its own life, the building lives its own life. At some point, you just shrug: "Act from what's on the plate, not on paper."

A bit of a stretch, sure. And yet this is exactly what's been happening with software development for decades 💻. Requirements-first was the dream — DDD/BDD said: describe the domain, then dance around that. Beautiful idea, except you can rewrite a document in an hour, while rewriting half the project takes months. So it doesn't matter what's in Jira; it matters what's inside the "src/" folder. That's why we invented Scrum: short increments, working to working, all to make code the source of truth.

Now imagine instead of workers, you have a 3D printer that prints the building from your blueprint in a month, and reprints it when you change it 🤖. Same thing with code — you change the user story,

#AI regenerates. The code catches up to the paper, not the other way around.

I'm not saying we're 100% there yet. The trajectory, though, is hard to ignore: on SWE-Bench Verified top models hit 90%+ (vs 23% two years ago), and on the harder, contamination-free SWE-Bench Pro, they're at 46% and climbing. Frameworks like BMAD emerge, and Amazon released Kiro — a spec-first IDE.

So what does this mean 🧠? If requirements are becoming the main thing, we should be storing prompts, not code. The skill of changing the blueprint matters more than the skill of laying bricks. Rebuilding just got cheap, and that quietly changes everything.

Half a year later, this analogy is aging well. Maybe even too well.