Designers should understand code the way an architect understands stone: what it can do, not how to cut it. AI now does the cutting.The same card in the design file and in the browser with real data. Image by the author.Early in The Fountainhead, Howard Roark is expelled from architecture school for refusing to design in borrowed styles. The Dean calls him in to explain himself, and Roark gives him a rule instead: “What can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites on earth are alike. No two buildings have the same purpose. The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape.”You don’t have to admire Roark to take the point. He is the architect in the book who spends his time on building sites, among the electricians and steelworkers, learning what the material will and won’t do. His classmates learn to draw...