When the whiteboard becomes the thing you build from
A weekend with Claude, and why the craft of engineering is moving up a level rather than shrinking.
The best engineering tool I have ever had was a room full of engineers and a whiteboard. Every attempt to digitise it produced diagrams that were fiction within a fortnight. This weekend I tried to fix that, and it turned into something bigger than a tool.
Chad Fowler's "Regenerative Software" essay finally gave me a framing that helped rationalize why I felt that way. AI has inverted the economics of code, implementation is becoming cheap and disposable, and the durable assets are the boundaries, the definitions of correct, and the captured intent, this is where the value has always been, it was just buried behind lines of code you had to type by hand to make it real.
I spent a weekend with Claude exploring what happens if the whiteboard becomes the thing you actually build from, rather than a picture of what you built.
The surprise wasn't the code we generated, it was that the idea refused to stay confined to just an engineering tool: it kept pulling in how product defines done, how design holds coherence, how work could be intentionally delegated between agents and humans so people stay genuinely close to a craft that machines increasingly perform, where human ingenuity could still contribute flourishes of genius to an outcome.
Somewhere in the middle of it, Claude offered a sentence "The craft doesn't shrink so much as move up a level, onto exactly the skills that have always distinguished strong senior engineers."
None of this exists yet beyond MD documents, and an MVP plan I have been burning free Fable credits on all weekend. Half of it is probably wrong, but it has me in solid agreement that the craft is not shrinking it is moving up a level, to the skills that always separated the strong engineers. Drawing the boundaries. Defining what correct means. Adjudicating the diffs.
Who else now builds the things you used to just imagine, so you can brainstorm and work through an abstract idea?
First posted on LinkedIn.