If writing a good document and a strong API had to happen anyway, and now you can write just that and the rest will take care of itself, we may actually have progressed. Plus the documents would then have to be there, instead of skipped like today.

The counter-argument is that code is the only way to concisely and unambiguously express how everything should work.

Honestly, we needed something to cap extreme programming and swing the pendulum back to a balance between XP and waterfall again.