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Comment by bossyTeacher

7 months ago

What about brownfield development though? What about vague requirements or cases with multiple potential paths or cases where some technical choices might have important business consequences that shareholders might need to know about? Can we please stop pretending that software engineering happens in a vacuum?

The thing with vague requirements is that the real problem is that making decisions is hard. There are always tradeoffs and consequences. Rarely is there a truly clear and objective decision. In the end either you or the LLM are guessing what the best option is.

  • Yes, decisions are but they need to be made. Ideally shareholders will be given as much context so they can decide. This communication is as vital as having good programming skills imo. Your beautiful code means nothing if it does not adequately solve the business problem

> What about vague requirements or cases with multiple potential paths or cases where some technical choices might have important business consequences that shareholders might need to know about?

If the cost of developing the software is 0, you can just build both.

  • or you can build 20 different versions. Your non technical person won't be happy about this though. They wanted 1 software system not 20 nor 2. Just one