James Huang, CEO of Mercury Technology Solutions. Tokyo - January 16, 2026
Let’s turn the clock back to the mid-19th century. Emperor Napoleon III of France is hosting a banquet. The guests are divided by class. The ordinary dukes eat off gold and silver plates. But the Emperor? He eats off a plate made of the most precious metal on earth: Aluminum.
At the time, extracting aluminum was a chemical nightmare. It was the "Crown Jewel of Industry." Then, in 1886, the Hall-Héroult process (electrolysis) was invented. Electricity became the new leverage. Overnight, the cost of production fell off a cliff. The metal reserved for Emperors became the metal used for Coke cans and disposable foil.
To the young engineers of 2026: You are in the electrolysis chamber. Your code is the aluminum. For decades, we treated code like gold because human brain cycles were the bottleneck. We worshipped "Clean Code" and "DRY" (Don't Repeat Yourself) because writing logic was expensive.
That era is over.
1. The Great Cost Inversion
We are witnessing a brutal economic inversion in software development.
- Reading Code (Old Logic): Still expensive. It costs high cognitive load for a human to decipher legacy spaghetti code.
- Generating Code (New Logic): Near zero. AI can generate perfect syntax in milliseconds.
The Insight: Waste is no longer "throwing away code." Waste is spending your precious cognitive energy to save code that is cheaper to recreate.
If you spend 4 hours refactoring a legacy module to "save it," you are trading your Gold (Time) for the market's cheapest Aluminum (Syntax).
2. The Framework: Fluid Engineering
To evolve from a "Guardian of Code" to an "AI-Native Commander," you must adopt Fluid Engineering. Here are the three mental models you need:
A. The Disposable Strategy
- Old Logic: "Software must be built to last. Writing a one-off tool is inefficient."
- New Logic: Code is a utility. Spend it like water.
- The Tactic: Do what Andrej Karpathy does. When he needs to check data quality, he doesn't patch an existing tool. He asks the AI to write a bespoke visualization app, uses it once to get the insight, and then deletes it.
- The Metric: Stop measuring "Code Longevity." Measure Time-to-Insight.
B. The "Clean Slate" Protocol
- Old Logic: Carefully diff and patch. Insert if-else statements to avoid breaking dependencies.
- New Logic: Don't Read. Just Rewrite.
- The Tactic: When a module breaks or needs an update, don't be a "Code Archeologist." Feed the old code to the AI as context and say: "This is the old logic. Here is the new requirement. Forget the old structure. Rewrite it optimally."
- The Result: You eliminate Technical Debt instantly because you are declaring "Code Bankruptcy" every single day.
C. Brute Force Verification
- Old Logic: Rely on senior engineer intuition ("Gut Feeling") because writing tests is tedious.
- New Logic: Arbitrage cheap compute for expensive certainty.
- The Tactic: Not sure if the logic holds? Don't guess. Ask the AI to generate 20 adversarial test cases. Ask it to generate 5 different algorithm variations and have them test each other.
- The Arbitrage: Your hourly rate is $100+. The AI's token cost is $0.01. Trade tokens for certainty.
3. The Nostalgia Trap
The biggest barrier to this shift isn't technical. It is Emotional Attachment. Engineers have a craftsman's vanity. You feel that because you wrote the line, it has a soul. You reject AI code because it lacks your "style."
Wake up. The market does not care if the aluminum foil was hand-hammered by an artisan or rolled by a machine. It only cares if it keeps the food warm. Stability is Stagnation. If you refuse to delete your "hand-crafted" legacy code, you will sink to the bottom of the ocean holding heavy ingots of worthless metal.
4. The Soul: Be the River, Not the Mason
This is terrifying, but it is also liberating. If code is as cheap as water, what is the "Gold" that remains?
It is Judgment. It is Context. It is Problem Definition. AI can lay tracks to anywhere, but it doesn't know where the train should go. You are no longer the Mason stacking bricks. You are the Hydraulic Engineer directing the flow. Your value is defined not by how much code you keep, but by how much you dare to delete.
The Next Step
Do this today.
- Pick a legacy function you hate maintaining.
- Do not read it.
- Write down the Input/Output requirements.
- Ask AI to generate a fresh version.
- Hit Delete on the old file.
Feel the freedom of the waste. That is your rite of passage into the AI Native era.
Mercury Technology Solutions: Accelerate Digitality.