> Agile itself is predicated on software being difficult to ship/expensive.

No, the opposite; it is predicated on software being cheap and easy to ship, but hard to correctly anticipate the needs for.

> It might not make sense to continue (waterfall might be better actually)

Waterfall, not agile, is predicated on software being difficult to ship/expensive.

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jboy55 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Imagine doing AI development in waterfall. You spend weeks writing your prompt, when you think you have it perfect, only then do you submit it to the AI. Then you wait a week or so, and see what it produced, expecting it to be exactly what you wrote.

Or, do you tell it the basic functionality you want, test it out, then add feature after feature that you want, sometimes dropping them and sometimes adding new ones that you thought of as your worked.

	▲	lazystar an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> Or, do you tell it the basic functionality you want, test it out, then add feature after feature that you want, sometimes dropping them and sometimes adding new ones that you thought of as your worked the problem with this is long term maintainability. it works - and the engineer understands how it works - but a) the AI does not prioritize cleanup/organization/naming, and b) there's a blind spot/boiling frog type of phenomenon that can prevent the engineer from spotting the growing problem. the codebase becomes recognizable only to them. the engineer sees all features working, all bugs fixed, 90% test coverage, and submits it for a PR. the engineer tasked with reviewing the PR will treat it as slop.

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atomicnumber3 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The vast majority of "AI is changing everything!" takes I read say more about people's fundamental misunderstandings of the software development lifecycle (the real one that companies actually do, not the one that people think they do or what companies say they do) than about anything AI is going to change about software eng.

If anything, their solving the complete wrong problems and being blind to the actual problems is probably a reason AI won't actually result in any real, top-level appreciable gains in shipping speed.