Comment by mrothroc

Fred Brooks famously advised us to plan to throw one away. That was in the days of waterfall engineering.

The reason he said that is because the best way to learn how to properly build a complex system is by going through the process of building it. Sure, implementation is a bottleneck, but the real problem is that the experience of development is the best teacher.

Personally, I try to bring this lesson into my agentic coding practice by doing spikes and trial implementations first. This is where the AIs really deliver value: they can quickly build something out that touches a lot of the architecture so both it and I can get the proper shape of it. Only after that do I unleash it, constrained by what we learned.