Comment by GreenWatermelon
23 days ago
Disagree. No plan survives first contact.
I can spend all the time I want inside my ivory tower, hatching out plans and architecture, but the moment I start hammering letters in the IDE my watertight plan suddenly looks like Swiss cheese: constraints and edge cases that weren't accounted for during planning, flows that turn out to be unfeasible without a clunky implementation, etc...
That's why Writing code has become my favorite method of planning. The code IS the spec, and English is woefully insufficient when it comes to precision.
This makes Agentic workflows even worse because you'll only your architectural flaws much much later down the process.
I also think this is why AI works okay-ish on tiny new greenfield webapps and absolutely doesn't on large legacy software.
You can't accurately plan every little detail in an existing codebase, because you'll only find out about all the edge cases and side effects when trying to work in it.
So, sure, you can plan what your feature is supposed to do, but your plan of how to do that will change the minute you start working in the codebase.