Could you qualify what you mean by "idiots"? The author and the examples he gives - Kent Beck, David Heinemeier Hansson, and Garry Tan - are all very experienced software engineers.
Funnily enough, Lemmy does allow AI-assisted code contributions, though they're not encouraged. This is mentioned in the code of conduct:
Use of so-called Artificial Intelligence (AI) is allowed only if it is explicitly mentioned. Additionally all LLM-generated text or code must be manually reviewed by the author before submission (no vibe coding allowed).
This article is not advocating AI driven development. It's arguing a human understanding the problem, and how best to solve it, is the most important work.
I’m not anti-spec. Far from it. I think rigorous, well-structured specs are about to be the single most important artifact in software. Read the book. Adopt the format. Use the tools. The mechanics matter and I’m not waving them away.
But the spec is a vessel. The recipe is not the cooking. If we pour mediocre understanding into a perfectly-formatted spec, we get perfectly-formatted slop, faster and at scale. The format is necessary. It is nowhere near sufficient.
The real work - the part no tool will do for you - is the human work of digging in. Of actually understanding the problem and the person you’re solving it for, deeply enough to have an opinion about what right feels like. Of capturing not just the requirements but the taste. The why. The elegance. The exact sweet spot of how it should work.
I agree that the AI generated image is trashy, however the article is a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of relying on agentic coding, instead of collaborating with other developers.
But there is always a ceiling on how far a single-player game can take you, even with agents. Software that lasts, software that grows, software that people can actually depend on – that is built by groups of people exercising judgment together over time. By teams developing shared taste, shared mental models, shared sense of what their product should be. None of that happens through individual prompting, no matter how clever the prompts.
Agile came from toyota?
My understanding is that Kanban came from Toyota, which is an agile way of working.
This is a fascinating article about the history of software development. For me the key quotes are:
The thing that killed Waterfall was that discovering your spec was wrong months later, after lots of code had been written - and fixing it cost a fortune because writing code was the most expensive part of the process.
The key reason Agile was invented was to account for the high cost of writing code, so yes, that part of the Agile value proposition is no more.
The risk isn’t that AI development is inherently Waterfall. The risk is that organizations with latent Waterfall instincts will use spec-generation as license to do the bad thing they always wanted to do — front-load requirements, skip customer validation, equate a fancier document with a better outcome, and ship one massive thing every quarter.
This quote from the article really sums it up:
And to be clear, I don’t care whether you typed the code yourself. I care whether you understood it before you shipped it. I care whether you can explain why the bug happened, why this fix is the right fix, what the model might have missed, and what would make you roll it back.
Could you elaborate on this?
Thank you! I've updated the post with the TL;DR from the article.
Depending on your level of programming experience, you might find the exercises at Exercism quite useful.
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Well that depends on how quickly you believe that engineering skills atrophy without use.
Though, I'd argue programming is like riding a bike. Even after a long break, it's not difficult to get back into it, as the fundamentals for programming haven't changed.