Code Is Not Cheap: Why Software Fundamentals Matter More Than Ever in the AI Era

An AI coding agent can inspect your repository, spin up a new endpoint, modify the database schema, wire the frontend, generate unit tests, handle errors, and produce a migration—all in under ten minutes. A task that once consumed an engineer’s entire afternoon can now be triggered with a single prompt. State Ownership: Does this new endpoint actually own this state, or is it creating a distributed monolith anti-pattern? Idempotency: Can this request safely execute twice if a network timeout triggers an automatic retry? Failure Modes: What happens if the database write succeeds, but the downst