Copy it or configure it

An apparel company sells group orders to hospitals and schools. Our standard group order page lists a lot of styles in a lot of colors. Then a veterinary school wanted their own page: a handful of styles, and every one of them black.

The fast move is to copy the page, delete the styles you don't need, comment out the colors, and ship it. With AI writing the code, that's a few minutes.

I didn't do that. I had Claude write a separate configuration layer, so the page reads which styles and colors to show from a config object. When the next school comes along with different colors, I change the config. I never touch the page.

That took maybe ten extra minutes. What stuck with me is that I had to ask for it. If I'd said "I need just these styles and these colors, and fix these few things," the AI would have started fresh, maybe with the old page as inspiration, and produced a second page that worked. Then a third school, a third page. Six months later I'd have six versions of the same thing, each slightly different, each one a separate fix when the checkout flow changes.

Most AI just does what you ask it, in the fastest way possible. If you ask for a separate version of something, it will copy and paste new files to save time. Every new request becomes a new build, because it's free. But the code is not the expensive part. Maintaining it is.

Historically there were separate teams that built products and used them. If I'm shipping a ride-hailing app, the user is the user, and they don’t care about the maintenance for the build team. An internal workflow isn't like that. The person who uses it, the person who maintains it, and the person who extends it next quarter can now be the same person.

So there's a third question I ask about every project: who maintains this, and who will iterate on it next?

I still lean toward configuration over starting fresh every time. Maybe I'm old school. But the cost of a workflow was never the building. It's everything after.