Danial Kalbasi

Notes on engineering leadership, building products, and figuring out what matters.

Writing is the new building

Writing is the new building

Generations of engineers hated to write documentation. Now the dominant use case for AI coding agents is... writing documentation.

Documentation felt painful because it was backward. Engineers needed to build the software and then explain what they did (Build → Explain). Now it's forward: developers explain what they want, and then they get the software (Explain → Build).

The next decade belongs to those who can clearly write what they need from the machine.