Comment by manmal
5 hours ago
This. Waterfall never worked for a reason. Humans and agents both need to develop a first draft, then re-evaluate with the lessons learned and the structure that has evolved. It’s very very time consuming to plan a complex, working system up front. NASA has done it, for the moon landing. But we don’t have those resources, so we plan, build, evaluate, and repeat.
That "first draft" still has to start with a spec. Your only real choice is whether the spec is an actual part of project documentation with a human in the loop, or it's improvised on the spot within the AI's hidden thinking tokens. One of these choices is preferable to the other.
So, rollback and try again with the insight.
AI makes it cheap to implement complex first drafts and iterations.
I'm building a CRM system for my business; first time it took about 2 weeks to get a working prototype. V4 from scratch took about 5 hours.
AI is also excellent at reverse engineering specs from existing code, so you can also ask it to reflect simple iterative changes to the code back into the spec, and use that to guide further development. That doesn't have much of an equivalent in the old Waterfall.
are you intentionally being vague here becuase it's a HN comment and you can't be arsed going into detail?
or do you literally type
> Look at the git repo that took us 2 weeks, re-do it in another fresh repo... do better this time.
I think you don't and that your response is intentional misdirection to pointlessly argue against the planning artifact approach.