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yason | 19 days ago
That describes the majority of cases actually worth working on as a programmer in the traditional sense of the word. You build something to begin to discover the correct requirements and to picture the real problem domain in question.
embedding-shape|19 days ago
That's one way, another way is to keep the idea in your head (both actively and "in the background) for days/weeks, and then eventually you sit down and write a document, and you'll get 99% of the requirements down perfectly. Then implementation can start.
Personally I prefer this hammock-style development and to me it seems better at building software that makes sense and solves real problems. Meanwhile "build something to discover" usually is best when you're working with people who need to be able to see something to believe there is progress, but the results are often worse and less well-thought out.
rvz|19 days ago
It's better to have a solid concrete idea written down of the entire system that you know you want to build which has ironed out the limitations, requirements and the constraints first before jumping into the code implementation or getting the agent to write it for you.
The build-something-to-discover approach is not for building robust solutions in the long run. By starting with the code first without knowing what it is you are solving or just getting the AI to generate something half-working but breaks easily and changing it once again for it to become even more complicated just wastes more time and tokens.
Someone still has to read the code and understand why the project was built on a horrible foundation and needs to know how to untangle the AI vibe-coded mess.
lelanthran|19 days ago
You lose that if the agent builds it for you, though; there is no iteration cycle for you, only for the agent. This means you are missing out on a bunch of learning that you would previously had gotten from actually writing something.
Prior to agents, more than once a week I'd be writing some code and use some new trick/technique/similar. I expect if you feel that there is no programming skills and tricks left for you to learn, then sure, you aren't missing out on anything.
OTOH, I've been doing this a long time, and I still learn new things (for implementation, not design) on each new non-trivial project.