True magic does not eliminate the work. It allows impossible journeys to begin before sunrise. There is a particular kind of engineering work that becomes expensive long before anyone has written much code. A team spends weeks debating architecture, defining abstractions, estimating implementation effort, and defending assumptions about users who have not yet touched the product. By the time the first working version appears, the original question has often been buried beneath the machinery built to answer it. Rapid prototyping exists to reverse that sequence, not by eliminating engineering discipline, but by moving learning earlier in the process. Instead of investing heavily before discovering whether an assumption is true, engineers…