What do you want built? Because the economics of software just changed.

For decades, building a real web application meant assembling developers, spending thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, and waiting weeks or months to get from idea to launch. AI is collapsing that timeline.

I built DevAnswers as part of a full-stack development course offered through the University of Texas at Austin. The course took us from JavaScript fundamentals and frontend/backend development through databases, APIs, testing, Docker, and deployment on AWS.

DevAnswers is a Reddit-style Q&A platform built with the MERN stack. It uses AI to improve questions before users submit them and automatically summarize discussions once a question has more than three answers. I also used Claude Code to help build features, troubleshoot problems, test functionality, and evaluate reliability and security.

The breakthrough is bigger than this one project. I can now take an idea, use AI to help design and write the software, integrate AI directly into the product, test it, containerize it, and deploy a working application to AWS—all in a fraction of the time and cost this would have required before.

This changes who can build software, how quickly businesses can experiment, and how fast an idea can become a working product.

So the question is no longer, “Can we afford to build it?” It’s: What do you want built?