Jonathan Stack
Fig 1. Agentic engineer

The job changed.

A lot of engineers are wondering whether design and architecture still matter now that AI is here.

We've all heard the term “AI slop.” It's well known that AI reads a mess faster than we can and figures it out anyway, so it looks like good design and clean code stopped mattering.

I think they matter more now than they ever did.

I spent my career building high-volume C# and .NET systems on Azure and AWS. I have strong opinions about how code should be written. We've all heard them before: SOLID principles, encapsulation, and so on.

AI writes a lot of code very fast, and that's precisely why this matters. Engineers are orchestrating teams of agents now, and eventually they are going to step on each other's toes. Changing the same files, merge conflicts, and so on. The blast radius of change brings bugs, higher costs, and downtime. We're already seeing it happen.

I believe to achieve the 50x engineer, you have to have solid fundamentals of software design.

These are my thoughts.

Selected Work

All projects

AI Command Hub

RustTauriReact

A native desktop app for running multiple Claude Code sessions. A status light and session icons tell me at a glance what each one is doing, so things stay organized and I stay on top of everything running.