Explaining to business people why building software is still hard

During a hackathon, a team building a recruiting app with an AI tool experienced rapid initial progress on day one but faced cascading bugs and failures on day two, highlighting why software development remains challenging despite modern tools. The author illustrates this struggle through a house-building analogy: just as a 30-year-old house requires careful planning before renovation to avoid compounding structural problems, software requires upfront infrastructure work and systematic debugging rather than quick fixes, which non-technical leaders often underestimate. The team ultimately succeeded by slowing down to methodically address issues rather than continuing rapid coding, demonstrating that sustainable software development requires deliberate planning and maintenance work.