Another take on the old adage that writing the code is the easy part of software engineering. The real work is figuring out what has to be built and how. Once that is clear, the actual building can be done relatively quickly and linearly.
I think the notion of a dead program is useful though it’s not always that clear cut:
The death of a program happens when the programmer team possessing its theory is dissolved. A dead program may continue to be used for execution in a computer and to produce useful results.
https://olano.dev/blog/software-design-is-knowledge-building