Comment by onion2k
21 hours ago
Developers should work by wasting lots of time making the wrong thing?
Yes. In fact, that's not emphatic enough: HELL YES!
More specifically, developers should experiment. They should test their hypothesis. They should try out ideas by designing a solution and creating a proof of concept, then throw that away and build a proper version based on what they learned.
If your approach to building something is to implement the first idea you have and move on then you are going to waste so much more time later refactoring things to fix architecture that paints you into corners, reimplementing things that didn't work for future use cases, fixing edge cases than you hadn't considered, and just paying off a mountain of tech debt.
I'd actually go so far as to say that if you aren't experimenting and throwing away solutions that don't quite work then you're only amassing tech debt and you're not really building anything that will last. If it does it's through luck rather than skill.
Also, this has nothing to do with AI. Developers should be working this way even if they handcraft their artisanal code carefully in vi.
>> Developers should work by wasting lots of time making the wrong thing?
> Yes. In fact, that's not emphatic enough: HELL YES!
You do realize there are prior research and well tested solutions for a lot of things. Instead of wasting time making the wrong thing, it is faster to do some research if the problem has already been solved. Experimentation is fine only after checking that the problem space is truly novel or there's not enough information around.
It is faster to iterate in your mental space and in front of a whiteboard than in code.
I've been doing this a long times and I've never had to do that and have delivered multiple successful products used by millions of users. Some of which were used for years after we stopped doing any sort of even maintaining with no bugs, problems or crashes.
There are only a few software architecture patterns because there's only a few ways to solve code architecture problems.
If you're getting your initial design so wrong that you have to start again from scratch midway through, that shows a lack of experience, not insight.
You wouldn't know this, but I'm also a bit of an expert at refactoring, having saved several projects which had built up so much technical debt the original contractors ran away. I've regularly rewritten 1,000s if not 10,000s of line into 100s of lines of code.
So it's especially galling to be told not only that somehow all code problems are unique (they almost never are), but my code is building technical debt (it's not, I solve that stuff).
Most problems are solved, and you should be using other people's solutions to solve the problems you face.