Figure It Out As You Go: Designing Software in the Age of AI

You don't need a perfect design upfront. You need a direction and the willingness to keep refining until things converge. This is what I learned after building the same app a dozen times, burning it down, and rebuilding it, until the system taught me what it wanted to be. The Myth of the Perfect Upfront Design Every software project starts the same way: someone draws boxes on a whiteboard and declares, "This is the architecture." There's usually a lot of nodding. Sometimes there's a second whiteboard. Then you actually start building, and reality shows up uninvited. The boxes don't fit. The data flows the wrong way. That service you thought would be simple has seventeen edge cases. By week three, you're writing code that quietly apologizes to the whiteboard. The hard truth is: you cannot know the full shape of your system before you've built parts of it. Requirements lie. Users surprise you. Scale reveals things that no diagram predicted. And that's fine. The problem isn't that your de