How I build now

AI changed how I build, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

I ship a lot of software now — a family of products, across several languages — faster than I ever could by hand. Most of that code is written with heavy AI assistance. A year ago that would have horrified me. Today it's just how the work gets done.

Here's the part people don't say out loud: I chose breadth over polish. Given the option to build one thing perfectly or ten things well, I took the ten. In the AI era capability compounds, and polish is cheap to add later — but only if the thing holds together while you move fast. That last clause is where most AI-built software falls apart.

Because AI doesn't write inconsistent code. It writes beautifully consistent code — inside a single prompt. Across prompts, across files, across services, across the same project over two weeks, it drifts. Different names for the same concept. Types that diverge at the edges. APIs that almost exist. Each piece is locally perfect and the system is globally incoherent. The more you ship, the worse it gets.

So I don't rely on willpower or careful prompting to stay coherent. I rely on architecture. There is a single typed model — the spine — that every product reads from. Code is generated from it, in every language. A conformance harness byte-checks the outputs against each other. And when the model changes, the drift breaks the build — loudly, before it ships. Imperfect code can't silently diverge, because the structure won't let it.

That spine is MetaObjects. I built it for myself 25 years ago and used it privately the whole time; I'm open-sourcing it now, because the problem it solves stopped being mine and became everyone's the moment AI started writing most of the code. My own products run on it — that isn't a demo, it's how I ship.

This is the bet I'm making: the future of building software isn't humans writing every line, and it isn't AI writing whatever it wants. It's humans authoring the model and the intent, AI generating the code, and a verifiable spine keeping all of it honest. Breadth at the speed of AI; coherence at the discipline of architecture.

I'm making that bet in the open. You can watch it play out at metaobjects.dev — and if you're shipping AI-built software at any scale, you already know which half of the bet is the hard one.