← Back to context

Comment by jgraettinger1

9 hours ago

I think there's a Danger Zone when planning is light-weight and iterative, and code is cheap, but reviewing code is expensive: it leads to a kind of local hill-climbing.

Suppose you iterate through many sessions of lightweight planning, implementation, and code review. It _feels_ high velocity, you're cranking through the feature, but you've also invested a lot of your time and energy (planning isn't free, and code review and fit-for-purpose checks, in particular, are expensive). As often happens -- with or without AI -- you get towards the end and realize: there might have been a fundamentally better approach to take.

The tradeoff of that apparent velocity is that _now_ course correction is much more challenging. Those ephemeral plans are now gone. The effort you put into providing context within those plans is gone. You have an locally optimal solution, but you don't have a great way of expressing how to start over from scratch pointed in a slightly different direction.

I think that part can be really valuable, because given a sufficiently specific arrow, the AI can just rip.

Whether it's worth the effort, I suppose, depends on how high-conviction you are on your original chosen approach.