Comment by majormajor

Historically software engineering has been seen as "assembly line" work by a lot of people (see all the efforts to outsource it through spec handoffs and waterfall through the years) but been implemented in practice as design-as-you-build (nobody anticipates all the questions or edge cases in advance, software specs are often an order of magnitude simpler than the actual number of branches in the code).

For mission-critical applications I wonder if making "writing the actual code" so much cheaper means that it would make more sense to do more formal design up front instead, when you no longer have a human directly in the loop during the writing of the code to think about those nasty pops-up-on-the-fly decisions.